I write about rednecks, but I often get the question, “what is a redneck?” Most people have the “Deliverance” stereotype in mind of a deviant and ignorant working class white man, who is deeply racist and violent. It’s a stereotype constructed for a reason. That reason is that all forms of politics need an enemy to rally around. It’s a strategy as old as politics itself.
The Republican Party used a similar strategy to characterize specifically Black people as violent, drug-using mooches. It’s called the Southern Strategy and was developed by Lee Atwater, Republican political operative and pretty damn good on the blues guitar. The Southern Strategy laid the cultural basis for mass incarceration and was foundational to Ronald Reagan’s campaign for president as well as Clinton and Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill. Think “superpredators.”
Obviously, most of the rhetoric behind mass incarceration was and is false, but the point is not necessarily truth or fiction, but political power. In bourgeois democracy, having a public heel gives politicians capital to rally votes behind. In other words, politicians portray themselves as defending virtue against a deviant population.
That deviant population in American political discourse is now rednecks, people like me. The Capitol insurrection is cast on the shoulders of rednecks, when the insurrectionists on more than one occasion arrived in DC on private jets. We’re cast as Trump supporters, when Trump’s best demographic was white people making $100,000-$200,000 per year - locally rich people in rural areas. Most of the rednecks that I know don’t vote at all and the only reason that I do is because my bougy wife makes me.
I voted for Thomas Sankara for president.
Even if it could be proven that all rednecks are Trump supporters, we still have to remember Marx - “the ruling ideas of each age are ever the ideas of the ruling class.”
Redneck intellectual and material independence is simply not allowed.
So who are we? We are Upright Men like Thomas Sankara. We care for our communities and families, we work hard, we strive for independence, and we act ethically no matter the personal cost to ourselves. In a country that doesn’t recognize us as full human beings, the only choice is the example of what a human being should be, to become a new man (sic) in Frantz Fanon’s words. Nothing could be more controversial.