Are you a Deplorable? The answer might surprise you. Take this short quiz to find out.
1. If you agree with this characterization of American Elites: “The self-satisfied cosmopolitan culture that sprang up among the affluent 20% or so of the industrial world’s population, who became convinced that the temporary ascendancy of policies that favored their interests was not only permanent but self-evidently right and just.”(The Fifth Side of the Triangle The Archdruid Report)
You’re a Deplorable.
2. If you question whether globalization is actually in the national interest:You’re a Deplorable.
3. If you question whether endless wars of choice, drone strikes and foreign interventions that cost the lives of countless civilians are actually in the national interest: You’re a Deplorable.
4. If you see the major institutions of American life as corrupt, ineffective, and blatantly favoring the financial/social elites: You’re a Deplorable.
5. If you think it’s wrong that some immigrants (the illegal ones) get to “jump the queue” ahead of the millions of legal immigrants who have waited patiently for years and paid the costs of following the rules: You’re a Deplorable.
6. If you see the concentration of media ownership as a threat to democracy:
You’re a Deplorable.
7. If you think the War on Drugs that’s imprisoned millions of young men is actually a War on the American People, a war that was prosecuted for the entire 24 long years of the presidencies of Bill Clinton, G.W. Bush and Barack Obama: You’re a Deplorable.
The US population has increased about 40% since the War on Drugs started in earnest in 1980, while the prison/Gulag population has increased over 400% since 1980.
8. If you see the informal quotas on Asian-American students in America’s Ivy League universities as wrong and blatantly racist: You’re a Deplorable.
9. If you favor kicking over the tables of the money-lenders at the temple–those wonderful money-lenders who fund the campaigns of our political elites– You’re a Deplorable.
10. In summary: if you question the self-serving, self-congratulatory, hubris-soaked dominance of the neoliberal Elites, You’re a Deplorable.
If you think being Caucasian is a requirement to qualify as a Deplorable, think again: anyone can be a Deplorable. If you’re a Hispanic-American or African-American who has seen your community gutted by the War on Drugs, and you’re against the American gulag, then you’re questioning the status quo: Bingo, you’re a Deplorable.
If you’re an Asian-American who is tired of accepting blatantly racist limits on Asian students in top-tier U.S. universities–the same sort of insidiously informal quotas that limited Jewish-American students in the early 20th century–you’re a Deplorable.
Regardless of your ethnicity, class or religion, if you perceive the institutions that govern American life as corrupted, riddled with favoritism and spin or as broken, you’re a Deplorable. If you question or resist the dominance of self-serving neoliberal elites, you’re a Deplorable.
This isn’t the elites’ definition, of course, because resistance to their dominance can’t be identified as the defining factor. If this truth were revealed, the various tribes of Deplorables might realize they have more in common than the corporate media will let on.
Though it was Hillary Clinton who made the Deplorables public, the elites of both parties share the same fear and loathing of anyone who questions or resists their control.
BONUS DEPLORABLE POINTS if you answer “yes”: do you think being corralled into a remote holding pen reserved for “expressing free speech” (i.e. resisting the elites) is a mockery of the Bill of Rights? Bingo, you’re a Deplorable.