Class Struggle, Slavery, TV, and Trump

Long before Blandings, long before Downtown Abbey, long before Upstairs, Downstairs (both the 1971 original and the short-lived 2010 remake), even long before The Duchess of Duke Street, there was a popular TV show about class, servitude, and servants. And, surprisingly, it wasn’t British (or more properly, English): it was American. That show was called Hazel and it ran for five seasons from 1961 to 1966. It was so popular that it spawned a short-lived competitor on a different network, Our Man Higgins, featuring the British actor Stanley Holloway, which only lasted a single season.

While the British shows were set in the historical past, generally between the early 1900s and the 1930s (until the advent of WWII) when service was more prevalent, Hazel was contemporary for the ’60s. And, like science fiction, it showed a world that only existed in the imagination of its writers. Like many TV shows of the time, it presented a fictional world of white patriarchy where children behaved, families went to church on Sunday, wives were usually happy homemakers or at best had some minor or hobby-like occupation, and all the major characters were white.*

While the idea of white women like Hazel being maids and cooks to white families in a white suburban neighbourhood may seem quaintly anachronistic, in the elitist households of today it is more often Latino, Asian, and coloured women who are the servants. And when Trump sets up the camps to hold millions of immigrants before their deportation, it’s entirely conceivable his white MAGA followers will be able to pick and choose from the detainees who they want as their underpaid (if paid at all) “servants” regardless of their previous careers, status, or education.**

Hazel presented what now seems the MAGA wet dream: it had an all-white cast where children behaved; fathers worked and made all the major decisions; women were polite, cute, and obedient; housework was a cheery chore, not drudgery. There are no abortions in Hazel; no one goes bankrupt over egregious medical bills; there are no oil companies destroying national parks; kids can bicycle safely on residential streets unthreatened by speeding pickup trucks and SUVs; and people of colour, when they do appear, tug their forelock and know their place. Remember Rochester in The Jack Benny Show?*

Watching Hazel is educational, like watching Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will. Hazel (and other shows of that era) represents the fictional world of life in the white supremacist patriarchy that Trump and his MAGA  pseudo-Christian Talibangelists want to “make great again” even though it only existed in the minds of the show’s writers. Now, thanks to a subservient populace who voted for him, the convicted felon, misogynist, racist and serial liar has a second chance to impose that patriarchal fantasy on the USA. And he will because the cognitively-impaired Trump apparently sees shows like Hazel as reality, not fiction.

America, conceived as a ‘classless’ society at its birth, was only ever such in the sense it did not have inherited nobility and royalty. It always had class divisions, along the lines of colour, religion, gender, celebrity status, and particularly wealth. In Trump’s pseudo-theocracy those lines will be made more prominent but along ideological lines. In fact, given the overt racism expressed by Trump, his running mate, and so many of his followers, I would not be surprised if there is a MAGA movement to legislate a return to indentured servitude if not outright slavery.

Of course, “class” has other meanings other than “a group sharing the same economic or social status” and “social status,” including values like tasteful, quality, elegance, stylish, admirably skillful and graceful. None of which apply to Trump, of course. His tastes are coarse, garrish, and pedestrian as befits his style. He is, and has always been, a tacky grifter selling tawdry  (usually made-in-China) products and cheap cons like his “university” to a gullible market. But he clings to his monetary social status and when in power wages war against anyone below his perceived level. As noted in the New York magazine this month, his class war is against “normal” people (emphasis added):

When Trump was president, his priorities were at odds with the interests of the most vulnerable. After he assembled the wealthiest Cabinet in history, he tried repeatedly to raise rents on at least 4 million low-income people, as ProPublica reported in a recent piece, and wanted to cut federal disability benefits for a quarter-million poor children. A Trump-era rule denied overtime pay to “millions of low-wage workers” because they made more than $35,568 a year, the outlet added. His broader agenda included cuts to health care, food, and housing programs that chiefly benefit poor and working-class people, and on labor, the former president was hardly a friend to workers or unions. He packed the National Labor Relations Board with appointees hostile to the rights of workers to organize, and during the height of the pandemic, his Labor Department assigned relatively small financial penalties to employers who put workers at risk of COVID infection and death…
Trump himself has repeatedly promised to make the economy worse for “normal” people. He’s said he will lower the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, and economists generally agree that his proposed tariffs would raise costs on goods and cause fuel inflation.

Trump clearly hates working-class Americans.  But even more than them, he hates anyone who isn’t white. And he plans to make non-white people suffer because, well, he can and he wants to. If you think MAGA restoring slavery is merely a paranoid liberal conspiracy, you have not been paying attention to the many racist comments Trump’s followers have been making ever since he first campaigned, but have been ramped up to a firehose of racial hatred from MAGA cultists this past campaign year. Here are just a few examples from the past eight years.

From AP News Nov. 10, 2024:

 Racist text messages invoking slavery raised alarm across the country this week after they were sent to Black men, women and students, including middle schoolers, prompting inquiries by the FBI and other agencies.

From CNN, Jan. 2024:

Trump’s comments about the Civil War are even worse than Nikki Haley’s
…He continued: “See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that.”…What exactly, would Trump have wanted to see “negotiated”? What did he think was open for discussion? The options at that moment in history were slavery or war, as many historians have noted.
His remarks recall last month’s gaffe — also on the subject of the Civil War — made by South Carolina’s former governor Nikki Haley, who is vying with Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Haley made a massive misstep when asked at a campaign event to name the causes of the conflict, naming a laundry list of reasons, but somehow managing to overlook slavery.

From Raw Story, June 2022:

MAGA hat-wearing Trumpster refuses to take a position on slavery

From Time Magazine, Feb. 2016:

Nearly 20% of Trump Fans Think Freeing the Slaves Was a Bad Idea
The Times found that nearly 20% of Trump supporters did not approve of freeing the slaves, according to a January YouGov/Economist poll that asked respondents if they supported or disapproved of “the executive order that freed all slaves in the states that were in rebellion against the federal government”—Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

From Business Insider, July 2023:

DeSantis says Black people benefited from slavery by learning skills like ‘being a blacksmith’
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said Black people benefitted from some of the skills they learned in slavery — and students in the state will soon learn about that “personal benefit” in Florida’s education curriculum.

From NBC News, July 2023:

New Florida standards teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught useful skills
The standards, which were blasted by a statewide teachers’ union as a “step backward,” were approved Wednesday by the State Board of Education… Other language that has drawn the ire of some educators and education advocates includes teaching about how Black people were also perpetrators of violence during race massacres.

From CNN, Sept. 2024:

‘I’m a black NAZI!’: NC GOP nominee for governor made dozens of disturbing comments on porn forum
Mark Robinson, the controversial and socially conservative Republican [Trump-favoured] nominee for governor of North Carolina, made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and expressed support for reinstating slavery, a CNN KFile investigation found.

From NBC, June 2024:

Elon Musk’s X app ran ads on #whitepower and other hateful hashtags
A review by NBC News found X running ads on 20 racist and antisemitic hashtags more than 18 months after Musk said that he would demonetize hate posts… Elon Musk’s social media app X has been placing advertisements in the search results for at least 20 hashtags used to promote racist and antisemitic extremism, including #whitepower, according to a review of the platform.

From Futurism, Jan. 2024:

Civil Rights Groups Horrified at Elon Musk’s Racist Outburst Against Black People
Earlier this week, multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk endorsed a tweet suggesting Black students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have lower IQs and shouldn’t become pilots.

From Flying Penguin, Feb. 2024:

X Twitter Keeps Promoting Slavery. It’s No Accident.
Tesla workers described the CEO as someone who encouraged pro-slavery racism in the workplace: “…frequent use of racial slurs and references to the manufacturing site as a plantation or slave ship.”
Now that same mindset has shifted to X Twitter, where Elon Musk promotes slavery and generates ad revenue from pro-slavery accounts.

The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution bans slavery and “involuntary servitude,” but if he can’t delete it, Trump’s MAGA lawyers will find a way to rewrite it with weasel words to allow forms of “voluntary” indentured servitude that are slavery all but in name. I expect Trump’s MAGA cultists will be able to “buy” their maids and servants from his detention camps and put them into indentured servitude: they will have a “voluntary” choice between detention, probable torture, and eventual deportation or “elimination” a la Stalin’s and Putin’s methods, or a life in impecunious service to white patriarchs, without, of course, any rights or freedoms of their own.

Notes

* In a similar vein, presenting the fantasy of white patriarchy in the 1950s and early ’60s were TV shows like The Andy Griffiths Show, Leave It To Beaver, The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, Father Knows Best, Ozzie And Harriet, My Three Sons, The Donna Reed Show, Dennis The Menace, The Danny Thomas Show, and The Dick Van Dyck Show. Only a very few like I Love Lucy introduced non-white leading characters (Latino in this case). Women’s roles improved in the mid-late ’60s with shows like That Girl and the Mary Tyler Moore Show presenting women as independent leading characters. The same is true of many contemporary animated shows like The Jetsons and The Flintstones. People of colour or Asian descent started getting leading or at least non-peripheral/non-stereotypical roles around then, too (Uhuru and Sulu in Star Trek, for example). It wasn’t until The Cosby Show of the 1980s that an affluent black family sitcom was made for TV.

** Not to mention his plan to impoverish working Americans through tariffs, reduced or eliminated social programs, and America-hostile economic policies. Plus he will gut or close many federal agencies and departments such as education, in order to keep the populace unprotected, vulnerable, and uneducated in anything outside the leader’s ideology so they become dependent on his “protection.”

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