Appearing as a guest on Thursday’s The ReidOut, MSNBC contributor Matthew Dowd compared poor Americans who voted for Donald Trump to poor whites who defended wealthy slave owners during the Civil War. How on Earth can he state that this is “the same thing repeating itself”?
During a discussion of the billionaires who supported Trump or are attending his inauguration, as if there weren’t also plenty of billionaires who voted Democrat, Dowd fretted over how much money they have: “The combined wealth of the few hundred billionaires in America — which Elon Musk and Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are part of or the leaders of — have more wealth … than the 75 million people who voted for Vice President Harris combined…”
He then invoked the American Civil War and poor whites who fought for the Confederacy as he continued:
And I think it’s … an incredible situation, and the problem I see is the same thing repeating itself from what happened in the Civil War and the aftermath where the working class whites of the South who had nothing to benefit by maintaining the system. … They got nothing out of the plantations. They got nothing out of it. But were convinced because of cultural sort of language and division that the white working class who should have sided with the North in this and should have sided with more freedom and should have sided with the freed slaves, ended up becoming part of that sort of awful thing, and that led through civil rights and that powerful people — and this is my fear today.
Joy Reid smirked throughout, and began nodding. Dowd, who was once a Republican, soon reiterated this bizarre comparison of MAGA backers to slavery backers:
Back then, powerful people convinced the white working class was not the — well, [that] the rich was not the enemy who were gobbling up everything — it was these cultural elites that were the enemy in their mind. And it’s the same thing is happening today. The powerful people are trying to segment off the white working class who are getting no benefit from this and will suffer in … the Trump presidency — but the same thing is repeating itself in our country again.
Reid then jumped in to agree:
Yeah, and — Amen, Amen, and I think you’re going to get an Amen from Baratunde [Thurston]too. I mean, that is the reality, Baratunde. We started as an oligarchy, and it was a planter class oligarchy, and then we became a railroad and industrial magnate oligarchy. And the only hundred years in which we have not been an oligarchy is the 20th century, right? … And I do think that the greatest trick that the billionaire class played was they figured out how to make themselves cool to working class — mainly white, but even some non-white — people who aspire to them.
After listing several big business owners attending Trump’s inauguration, Reid added: “They now control the media so that they can tell white working class and brown working class and black working class people. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no. The billionaires aren’t the enemy — it’s the gays, it’s the trans, it’s the immigrants, it’s the brown people. Don’t focus on us — focus on them.'”
Transcript follows:
MSNBC’s The ReidOut
January 16, 2024
7:12 p.m. Eastern
MATTHEW DOWD, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: The combined wealth of the few hundred billionaires in America — which Elon Musk and Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are part of or the leaders of — have more wealth, more wealth than the 75 million people who voted for Vice President Harris combined — the few hundred billionaires, more wealth than 75 million people who voted for the Vice President combined in this. And I think it’s incredible — an incredible situation, and the problem I see is the same thing repeating itself from what happened in the Civil War and the aftermath where the working class whites of the South who had nothing to benefit by maintaining the system. Nothing — because they got nothing out of it.
They got nothing out of the plantations. They got nothing out of it. But were convinced because of cultural sort of language and division that the white working class who should have sided with the North in this and should have sided with more freedom and should have sided with the freed slaves, ended up becoming part of that sort of awful thing, and that led through civil rights and that powerful people — and this is my fear today.
Back then, powerful people convinced the white working class was not the — well, [that] the rich was not the enemy who were gobbling up everything — it was these cultural elites that were the enemy in their mind. And it’s the same thing is happening today. The powerful people are trying to segment off the white working class who are getting no benefit from this and will suffer in the Trump primacy — the Trump presidency — but the same thing is repeating itself in our country again.
JOY REID: Yeah, and — Amen, Amen, and I think you’re going to get an Amen from Baratunde, too. I mean, that is the reality, Baratunde. We started as an oligarchy, and it was a planter class oligarchy, and then we became a railroad and industrial magnate oligarchy. And the only hundred years in which we have not been an oligarchy is the 20th century, right? And not even all of the 20th century. We had to fight the Robber barons, right? And I do think that the greatest trick that the billionaire class played was they figured out how to make themselves cool to working class — mainly white, but even some non-white — people who aspire to them.
And they said, “No, Donald Trump is your aspiration — you can get there. I mean, he was born with $317 million, but you can get there.” And now look at these guys. Here’s the people who are going to attend the inaugural — David Sacks of OpenAI, the Uber CEO, PayPal CEO, the SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, Amazon CEO, Meta CEO, on and on and on. They now control the media so that they can tell white working class and brown working class and black working class people. “No, no, no, no, no, no. The billionaires aren’t the enemy — it’s the gays, it’s the trans, it’s the immigrants, it’s the brown people. Don’t focus on us — focus on them.”
BARATUNDE THURSTON, HOST OF LIFE WITH MACHINES: The old technique of divide on conquer is at work here again…
