Rural Idiocy and the Socialist Boogeyman
I’m just going to say it. Americans are becoming increasingly stupid. We’re too busy doom scrolling fake news on Facebook and watching conspiracy theory videos on YouTube to pick up a book. All hail Mark Zuckerberg. The end of literacy will surely mean the end of American democracy as we know it. Some thinkers and writers like Margaret Atwood argue that you can’t have one without the other. I have zero fears of Communism, but ample fears of Idiocracy.
I grew up in rural Wyoming, otherwise known as Redneck Paradise. One comedian aptly described the state as “one big Walmart parking lot.” I was surrounded by masses of white proletariat, a handful of low-level bourgeois, and even fewer upper-class bourgeois. I know my people. And I know the self-interested aristocratic and parochial Republican masters who control and indoctrinate them into their love for White Jesus and their fear and hatred for the Socialist Boogeyman. Both powerful figments of their cultural imagination.
Proletariat? Bourgeois? Aristocrats? For a population absolutely terrified of communism, I can promise you that the vast majority have no idea what it is and are unable to identify the language of class that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined in their manifesto. Today, communism and socialism are just words; words used by Republican power players to terrify and manipulate the white working-class and religious masses of middle America. Like the imaginary monster under the bed, they are terrified this Socialist Boogieman will eat them alive. Propaganda is a powerful force to be reckoned with, especially when books are no longer in fashion.
America is not at risk of falling to communism; communism is a failed economic and political experiment. After two hundred years of trying, the only purely communist/socialist state to succeed is post-war Vietnam. And they are still evolving, no doubt influenced heavily by prevailing capitalist powers. Yes, looking at you capitalist China; communist only in name because it hates freedom. Socialist Bolivia is TBD.
Economic utopia is a fantasy. Always has been, always will be. As that great Eastern teacher Jesus once reportedly said, “The poor will always be with you.” And a forced and failed utopia, led by Marxists revolutionaries and dictators like Stalin, Castro, and the Kim dynasty, usually results in dystopia. A visit to the Eastern Block after the fall of the Soviet Union or a trip to modern Cuba, North Korea, or Venezuela should cure any bright-eyed young communist of their romantic notions of a centralized economy. If only Karl Marx had a crystal ball.
Utopia might be a fantasy, but that doesn’t mean we should forgo the fight to establish basic human decency as the foundation of our free market. Most modern liberals and progressives aren’t advocating for Marxism. They are advocating for free and competitive commerce that is also fair and ethical.
Unregulated capitalism, what Ghandi called “Commerce without Morality”, has resulted in the transatlantic slave trade, hundreds of years of slavery in the Americas, child labor, sweat shops, drug trafficking, the destruction of the environment, the mass slaughter of American bison to near extinction, sex trafficking, and the list could go on. Because capitalism without morality is just despotism.
Most black and indigenous Americans have been so blatantly oppressed by white capitalists in this country for four hundred years, that they are unashamed to acknowledge the unfairness and demand economic reform and justice. And they are often the leading voices, or at least they should be, in these conversations surrounding economic reform. We should listen to them. It has been progressive, liberal policies and voices that have abolished immoral capitalist practices, one by one, since the abolition of the slave trade. That doesn’t mean we should scrap capitalism as a whole and trade it in for pure socialism. Either/or thinking is never the answer.
Your stereotypical liberal elitist in 2020 still wants little Samantha to graduate top of her class at private school, attend a top tier university, and get a well-paying job upon graduation. No way are they giving up that privilege and wealth. Fuck communism. But as they sit in their brand-new SUV outside the ballet studio, sipping a $6 latte from Starbucks, they think to themselves, “Let them eat cake.” And by cake, they mean, “At the very least, let the poor have health care.”
But the white rural idiots respond with, “Universal health care is a communist abomination. I don’t need health insurance. We can take care of ourselves.” Meanwhile, their teeth are falling out, they’re dying of suicide and opioid overdoes by the millions, and they are starting socialist Go Fund Me pages to pay for medical bills and funeral expenses. “Give me liberty or give me death,” they cry. “But please,” they beg of friends, family, and strangers, “help me pay for my freedom.”
All the proletariat masses and religious fanatics of the Republican Party are controlled by a handful of very smart and wealthy men and women using them as pawns, with claims that the liberals will take their guns and shut down their churches. So, they bow to their god Trump and his aristocrat cronies, demanding the God-given right to be poor, sick, and stupid.
Because the poor and/or rural white man is most afraid of one thing, which drives him to stupidity and suicide. Pity. He will demand his right to be poor and illiterate before he ever takes a handout; and by handout he means equitable access to health care or education. His privileged whiteness is the only tangible thing he can hold onto with certainty. This ignorant and illiterate mass of humans, referred to as peasants in the Communist Manifesto, are suffering from what Karl Marx called “rural idiocy”, characterized by hidebound conservatism, religious fanaticism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, ignorance, distrust, conspiracy theories, economic risk aversion, and the inability to cooperate with others in collective endeavors.
Marx was convinced that such attitudes prevented peasants from acting as a revolutionary class. But what I don’t think he could have foreseen was the mass amounts of firepower in the hands of the rural idiots. Our modern peasants are heavily armed. So, it makes sense that most mass shooters are disenfranchised white dudes. If there is another “revolution”, we can be assured it won’t be an intellectual one or well organized. My rural idiot brother, who I love and respect for his many good qualities, assures me that he and his friends can easily gun down me and my friends. And I believe him. Again, I don’t fear communism. I fear Idiocracy.
At the end of the day, for our country and our economy to sustain and succeed, we all need access to basic human dignity — whether we’re rich or poor, rural or urban, white or indigenous, male or transgender. Dignity is qualified with nutritious food on the table, quality and affordable education, life-saving medical treatment without bankruptcy, worship in the church or temple of our choice, a decent job, safe housing, and the right to love and marry and procreate as we so desire.
The either/or combat between capitalism and socialism is old and tired. Truth be told, the most successful countries and economies in the modern era are a hybrid of both. And as a democracy, we get to decide for ourselves the perfect mix of capitalist enterprise and social policies that will promote healthy competition and innovation in the free market, while providing access to basic human dignity for all. This is what the founders of our constitution called, “forming a more perfect union”. But in order for us to progress, the Socialist Boogeyman must be put to rest and we must learn to read and think critically again. Let’s get to work and make something new and better, together.
