the consensus reality of plutocrats, politics, and the media didn't include the Left Behind...

Move over Rat Pack and Brat Pack Here comes the Snap Pack

counterpunch |  It is probably a truism that you do not know people you do not hang out with very well. Maybe you read about them but if you happen to be the person who is hired to write about them, they probably do not get written about. You know why. Because they are not the people, you know very well or at all.

Let us say we have the sort of generous plutocracy where about 20% of the population, most of them the professional/gentrified class and a few at the very top, the Equestrian/Patrician class. First, let me say, that one fifth of a population of over 300 million is enough to keep the Dow Jones doing its ups and downs. Also, members of this top 20% keep the 80% informed, not about the 20 people who have wealth equal to 50% of the population or about the consequences of this. Now the 80% who do not know fuck all about Wall Street’s dark dealings have suddenly, in the eyes of the 20%, emerged to push the presidential candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

For the gentry, whether Democrat or Republican, this is like your hired Nanny telling you to shut up, or a bunch of hooligans busting through the gates of your “community” and wanting to do something other than clean your pool. Somebody has shown up at the electoral dinner party who wasn’t invited and whose name is unknown. This is not exactly like Nat Turner showing up in a bloody rebellion but the sheer unexpectedness of it is something like what 20% of the country is now facing with the populist explosion in both parties.

So how come almost no one who represents what is going on knew this would happen? Simple answer: they did not know these people were there because they were not reporting anything about them and they were not reporting anything about them because they were invisible to them. Look at it this way: no one had been campaigning the bottom 40% hard since…never. We have thrown into that group blue collar workers, the once unionized manufacturing working class, the “salaried” class, and now all, The Underclass. The classless, ungentrified. They have less shopping power than the top 20%, they do not usually vote, they have no one lobbying for them, they are not needed as laborers except for jobs that cannot be sent out of the country, and they have almost no leverage in a plutocracy. Right now, we have a burgeoning plutocracy still tied to an electoral, representative democracy and so “one person one vote” remains the solo bargaining chip of plutocracy’s “negative assets,” how The National Review refers to Trump’s followers.