Way to ruin our fun, Alex

Alex is a big partypooper and interrupts our previously scheduled gloating with a serious post about poverty and why feeling schadenfreude at the misery of even such an obvious dickhead as Du Toit is wrong:

The whole point of everything from some way to the right of centre – Bismarck or thereabouts – leftwards is that IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU. It doesn’t matter if you’re a good christian, a loyal subject, a committed rebel, if you work harder, if you’re especially competent. Even if you’re rich; European history is littered with the monuments of elites who thought they could buy their way out at the last. We survive if everyone else does.

Poverty and misfortune are not, generally, held up by individuals’ decisions; they roll over the landscape, driven by shifts in huge statistical aggregates and channeled by tiny ripples of random chance, just as a flood begins with a rise in average rainfall and ruins one street that’s six inches closer to the water. When you think that so-and-so went bust because of their own immorality, and therefore they join the undeserving poor, you’re signing on with the other side. They will tell you that the system is entirely OK; it’s the ones who failed it who are the problem. They didn’t believe in it enough.

As per usual, Alex’s got a point. In our defense I would like to argue though that we’re not laughing at Du Toit’s misery so much as at the large disconnect between his actions and his beliefs. An internet hard man who ranted about “the pussification of the American male” but who confused talking the talk with walking the walk. Being kind to him won’t change his philosophy or make him understand what Alex is saying here. In his head he will always believe that because he has the right kind of politics the world owes him a living, that while he is struggling heroically to feed his family everybody else in the same situation as him is just lazy and deserves to be poor.

In this he apes his own leaders, the people who’ve been using him and millions more like him, but less high profile. Every wannabe Mad Max sitting in the Monday morning traffic jam listening to Limbaugh, every twentyseven percenter still believing in Bush, every third rate wingnut calling for a leper list of Republicans who were mean to Sarah Palin, all of them had been willing tools of a small elite of cynical manipulators who used them to plunder the country. All of them believed that they themselves were part of that elite, were equal to the Roves and Bushes and Limbaughs and all of them got a rude awakening this past month. First the credit crunch metastatised, then their next big hero, Palin, failed to win the elections for McCain and suddenly the real powerbrokers abandonded them.

What happened to Du Toit and his family is what’s been happening to faithful Republicans and wingnuts all over America. Only a few years ago he was a hero of the blogosphere, riding high while Bush stole another election, part of a seemingly unstoppable coservative movement that would rule America for ever. Now? Just another smalltime loser thrown to the wolves.

Which, as we have seen before, is a dangerous development. One of the biggest challenges the American left, from the centrist part of the Democratic power taking power next january all to the tiny “lunatic fringe” of real socialists that still exists faces in the next four to eight years is how to face the anger and hurt of these millions of “useful idiots” now abandonded by the movement that created them. We desperately need a new, broad leftwing movement that takes the anger and hatred of these people and channels it towards targets deserving of this anger, rather than let if fall into the familiar ruts of xenophobia and resentment of blue America.