The Uber-Underclass
By Daniel Greenfield
DanielGreenfield.org
America's political system is coming apart. Cities
are once again burning because of the plight of what
an older class of liberals used to call the
underclass. They don't use that term anymore, and
not just because lefties have to refresh their
terminology to keep the educated class they have
wrapped around their media from realizing that the
ideology they treat as progressive dates is older
than the telegraph, but because the underclass
consists of ghetto kids making nothing and NBA
players.
When the star of an HBO series is out there
protesting on the front lines, when the sons and
daughters of millionaires go to war with cops who
couldn't afford to buy their shoes with a week's
salary, when Black Lives Matter, an organization
backed by the Ford Foundation, one of the country's
wealthiest institutions, organizes the burning and
looting of family shops, the underclass is a
laughable term.
The uber-underclass acts as if social mobility
doesn't exist when it's been the beneficiary of the
single greatest effort at subsidized social mobility
in human history. There's hardly an institution,
corporation, or government agency that hasn't put
diversity in its mission statement. Contractors and
colleges move minority applicants to the front of
the line in this oppressive racist nation of ours.
Those predatory corporations who, in the lefty
narrative, are grinding the bones of the underclass,
are out front cheering on the very people who are
looting their stores. "Smash us," cry the
capitalists.
The uber-underclass cries that it's being
oppressed, but who, besides the occasional police
officer, who has undergone more diversity training
than most college graduates, has body cams welded to
every part of his uniform, and knows that one single
smartphone video clip can destroy his life, is
oppressing anyone? The government, the corporations,
the media, academia, Bueller, Bueller?
Is there a single institution in modern American
life that isn't obsessively cheering on the rioters?
The best evidence of that is that there's nobody
standing between them and anything they want to take
except the occasional exhausted officer nervously
holding a shield in front of his face while facing a
mob howling for his blood. The only form of
oppression that still exists is one of those
overworked public servants making chump change in
exchange for risking his life to protect everyone
else.
Oppression is not being allowed to steal, smash,
burn, and kill your way across major cities.
Ah, but wait. Here come the obsessive march of the
statistics. Think of disparate impact, life
expectancy rates, asthma and diabetes cases,
interactions with the criminal justice system,
likelihood of finishing college, median annual
income, and collective family wealth. There's your
oppression even if the nexus for it is somewhat
ambiguous. Are banks unwilling to lend, too willing
to lend, are there food deserts in areas burned out
by looters, are tobacco companies marketing in the
inner cities.
That's where academics make big bucks piling up
conspiracy theories for the uber-underclass.
Lefties got around the inevitable failure of
historical materialism by inventing a permanent
underclass that would never defect to the
capitalists once they were able to buy a home and
own two cars. The only purpose of that permanent
underclass is to justify the expansion of
government. Every argument comes down to a debate
between the socialist party and the corporate party
over which of their ideologies would do a better job
of lifting up people from poverty. Nobody ever asked
the people if they wanted to be lifted up, how they
want to be lifted up, and if they actually are poor.
Poverty, as lefty academics might say if their
transgressive imaginations could venture beyond
making similar declarations about history, math and
aesthetics, is a construct invented by dead white
males. Its relevance to 2020s America is much less
than to Dickensian England.
The working poor were so because they aspired to
more or at least needed to feed their families. But
what if feeding your family isn't an issue and you
don't aspire to climbing the capitalist ladder? Then
you go out and loot the stores of the Korean or
Iranian immigrants who still believe in hard work.
The old rules of the American Dream don't apply at
all in some parts of the country. And they only go
so far in the rest of it. The issue is inequality,
but not of the kind that academics who are paid six
figures a year to lecture on the subjects mean. In
most of the world, people have access to the
resources that their social status entitles them to.
America's bold experiment in meritocracy began to
fold when we decided that people deserve a social
status that they haven't earned or worked for.
And then we decided that if they hadn't achieved it,
despite our best efforts to get it for them, our
system was still too unequal, and needed to be
rigged some more in order to be a good system.
The underclass gained social status and became the
uber-underclass: a paradoxical contradiction in
terms. Their success became the barometer of our
goodness. If they weren't getting ahead, then we had
failed them. Somehow the failure of other people
proved that we were bad people after all.
That's how we got here. And that's why we continue
to repeat the same scenes of burning cities, looted
stores, angry mobs, violent confrontations, and
pious lectures about our faults.
There's nothing especially wrong with us except that
we keep doing the same stupid things.
We want to be good people. Not really in the
biblical sense or any traditional American sense. We
want to be the heroes of a Hollywood movie. We want
to be the guys who sit in the balcony cheering for
the underdog, not the smug fat rednecks or the
capitalists in top hats who like things the way they
are. We want to fight for change, and a better
world, and all those things that fit so well on
bumper stickers. Even the best of us is often quite
stupid that way. We can't help it. It's our culture.
Americas thought that because we could build planes,
spaceships, and TV dinners, that we could build a
better society by throwing away all the old ideas,
and becoming progressive and modern.
Now we're not much good at two out of three of those
things. And our society is badly broken.
There was nothing wrong with America except that we
thought there was. And we thought that there was
because there were things wrong with us. Life had
become too comfortable and we had become so used to
working hard that we were sure that we were guilty
of something. But what were really guilty of was
forgetting how hard our parents had worked and how
much we owed to G-d.
Instead we stripped our religion of all morality
except for a call for social justice for the less
well off.
Our morality has long since become the incessant
drone of Marxism. We cannot even conceive of any
other morality except its opposite. America forgot
who it was, as Obama liked to say, and all that we
know is that things don't work, and we wish they
would, but we've forgotten how things work.
The Constitution, the Republic, and, for that
matter, G-d, didn't fail us. We failed because we
forgot.
The uber-underclass is our revenge. It is what
happens when we forget how things work and where
they come from. It's the eventualism of searching
for coolness, hipness, and all the outmoded terms
for that intangible sensation of being on the
cutting edge of something by forgetting yourself.
We are being punished for our attitudes with the
consequences of those attitudes. And we are
inflicting the pain on ourselves by refusing to wake
up and remember who we really are.