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I've been thinking about the implicit narrative over the past couple days that the Coup Crew was disproportionally "working class" (despite evidence to the contrary-- in particular what we've learned about the class backgrounds of many of those who've been identified).
This isn't new or surprising, of course... we've spent four years imagining a default Trump supporter as some sort of poor white backwoods monster, again, despite that being demonstrably false https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/
As has been well documented (Nancy Isenberg lays it out super thoroughly in White Trash), the trope of backwoods white "waste people" who embody all our worst qualities as a nation (racism, authoritarianism, boorishness) goes back to the very beginning of white America.
I used the term "sin-eater" yesterday in reference to this trope and that's really its function, allowing white America to absolve itself of responsibility for creating this mess by putting all the blame on poor white people or rednecks or hillbillies, etc., etc.
Add to that the Sum of Small Things-ification of everything, where we sort which "team" we're on via superficial consumer signifiers (eg. we see a Whole Foods totebag and assume "oh, that's a bougie liberal" and we see duck camo and assume "oh that's a poor redneck")...
...Even though many of the things we generally code as "white working-class items" (guns, trucks, boats, tactical outdoor gear, etc.) are phenomanally expensive...
Not to mention the fact that, as has also been well documented, all this reinforces the idea that the working class itself is still white and male, when it is actually disproportionally women of color in service fields https://www.epi.org/publication/the-changing-demographics-of-americas-working-class/
Added all up, it's a self-perpetuating loop. We hear "racist Trumper" and we imagine a poor white rural person... then we see a coup on TV and we see duck camo and guns and the way our brain incorrectly codes all of that as "poor people stuff" then reinforces our first assumption
We then go through a couple cycles of either shunning or fetishizing rural poor white people, neither of which does anything except make white capitalist America feel better when we go "back to normal." Nothing changes structurally, nobody has to challenge themselves in any way.
All of this has been pointed out before, of course, but this trope is so persistent and so predictable that it bears repeating at least a bit more.
