Timothy Snyder on sadopopulism, Trumpomuskovia -- "Class War or Culture War? Both"

Last edited Thu Dec 19, 2024, 10:38 PM - Edit history (2)

Food for thought as la lucha continua.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/class-war-or-culture-war

"...Trump ran as a rich white guy and won; Harris ran as an American and lost...
By connecting the desire for change with emotions that make it impossible, he (and many others) generate, in the end, sadopopulism: a politics that works not because all benefit, but because some learn to take pleasure in the greater suffering of others.
Deportations have to be understood in this light: they are a spectacle of the suffering of others. So does mass incarceration.

A test for this, as we have been recently reminded, is health. Persuading people that it is normal to pay for shorter lives is the litmus test of sadopopulism. In America, we do in fact pay exorbitant amounts of money to harmful middlemen who kill us by denying us care that we could afford if their scam did not exist.
(It is a sign of our cultural problem that we say "insurance" or "health care" when we mean "death grift." ) The recent assassination of the CEO of the misnamed company UnitedHealthcare brought the middleman problem into focus. On the internet, people on the Right joined people on the Left in sharing family stories of expense, uncertainty, suffering and death.

Will it matter that almost everyone agrees?
Why did people who want better health care vote for Trump? Why do we not have a single-payer system? Who do we pay so much more and get so much less than other people in other countries? Why was it so hard for both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who were very popular presidents, to pass the kind of health care reform they favored? Part of it is, of course, that we have too much money in politics (a class factor, let's say); but part of it is that many people who would gain security, prosperity, and lifespan from a better system don't want it if they have to share it with others (a culture factor, let's say).

How this will play out under the coming Trump regime is a test. If Trump were a true populist, which he is not, he would seize on the issue of health care to gain support from Americans all over the political spectrum (this is an idea I steal from Kate Woodsome). The grifter king must protect all grifts. UnitedHealthcare, a company that makes lots of money by delivering a lethal absence, represents just the sort of capitalism that a Trump regime must celebrate. Indeed, the plan in the middle term (RFK JR.) seems to be to make us all sicker, so that even more advanced grifts are possible.

And so in Trumpomuskovia a way will have to be found to change the subject from health care, to blame the Blacks or the migrants or the trans people for all the lethal dysfunctionality, to connect the assassin himself to some conspiracy of unlikable figures, or something.
It's not clear just how this will work -- most likely, the first move will be not to move at all, in the reasonable hope that the policies of January and February and March will be so frightening that people will forget about health care. And maybe this will work.

If it does, we can look forward to a new kind of fascism.
In the traditional sort, your children had to die on the front to perpetuate a vision of racial glory.
In this iteration, your children have to die of diseases so that people who are already billionaires can become wealthier.
The Trumpomuskovian policy will be to keep the death-grift billionaires we have, and create new ones by ending vaccinations and thereby opening the snake oil market.

This is a deepening of class differences, between the wealthy and the long-lived and the financially and existentially precarious. It is a possible future thanks not only to greed, but also to a culture in which we don't see our own health care problems as everyone's, and in which we can be easily drawn, by personal fears that activate prejudice, away from seeing ourselves as part of a larger class of people who could be living better and longer lives.

All the same, it won't be enough to be outraged at the terrible injustice in the abstract. Even when the issue is life itself, "class not race" won't work. We need the mode of outrage at the numbers. But we will also need the mode of empathy for African Americans and others whose marginalization has been used to keep health care -- and good policy generally -- from coming about. This is the most important effort, over time.
How shock, including the shock of illness, strikes a population depends on how that population has prepared itself. And, yet, we will also need empathy for people who voted for Trump and who get sick. People change their minds, but not usually when they are suffering alone. This is a different kind of move, hard for different reasons, but necessary.

About class, about differences in wealth, we need clarity, and we need outrage.
But we will not get far without equal clarity about race. Without empathy for others, we cannot see ourselves. Without empathy, every inequality can get worse, and will.
But Trump and Musk and other oligarchs can be stopped when they try to blame our health care debacle on those who suffer the most from it.
They can be stopped when they try to ban vaccines and profit from further disease and death.
With empathy, health care might just be an issue where the oligarchy fails to consolidate [sadopopulism] , and the people begin to hear themselves speak.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/class-war-or-culture-war