Quote from: TDoS on Oct 11, 2026, 09:09 AM

Quote from: K-Dog on Oct 10, 2026, 07:26 PMLooks like they go what they voted for.  Why do I not feel sorry?  Because when adults are idiots it is a choice. 

I do feel their pain, that is different. 

I can feel it, but I have to ask.  How many more times will these class traitors have to starve before they learn?

So poor people, who don't have your education, wealth or life experience, are "class traitors"? Because...they don't agree with your politics?

You've misunderstood the term, and I want to clear that up, because it matters.

"Class traitor" is not a moral insult. It's not me calling someone a bad person, or stupid, or uneducated. It's a statement of fact about a relationship. A worker who votes for a billionaire who will cut their food aid, gut their safety net, and hand their jobs to the coal bosses is acting against the interests of their own class.

That's what the phrase describes. It's not a slur; it's a description of what the vote does.

And you made my point for me, more precisely than I could.

You said the people of Appalachia "may no more believe that anyone's political system will cure their living conditions," because they've been pitched the same promise since Johnson's War on Poverty and seen it come to nothing. That's exactly right. And that's the tragedy. They've been betrayed so many times by the Democrats, by union leadership that told them how to vote.  By every politician who said: "vote for me and I'll give you stuff" , that they've decided no political system can help them. So they vote for the man who promises to bring back the mines, and they get starvation for swallowing his lie.  Learning too late that lying is all this man ever does.

You've described a working class that has been systematically lied to and abandoned by the very institutions that were supposed to represent it. And then you've concluded that the workers are therefore justified in voting against themselves because what else could they do you think? That's where we part ways.

The fact that someone has been betrayed doesn't make their self-destructive vote any less self-destructive. It explains it. And the explanation is not "they're idiots".

It's that the organizations that were supposed to give them a political alternative sold them out. The United Mine Workers, which you remember from your uncle's generation, didn't just fade away. It was deliberately hollowed out.   Its leadership.  People like Richard Trumka, sabotaged strikes and made deals with the coal companies.  They delivered the miners to the Democratic Party, which did nothing for them.

The union told them how to vote, and the union told them to vote for a party that was cutting their throats. The Democrats became the party of Wall Street, and workers had nowhere to go.  Unions had spent decades making sure there was no independent working-class party, no socialist alternative, nothing but parties that are two sides of the same rich coin.

When a West Virginia town votes 76 percent for Trump, I don't see idiots.  I asked when will they learn.  Idiots can't learn.

The end of a century of betrayal by the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party and the vote is a vote for a billionaire against their own survival.

Calling that "class treason" is not contempt for the workers. It's contempt for the people who put them in that position.  To pretend that voting for your own starvation is somehow a rational or defensible choice just because the alternatives were also putrid shit is on the other side of crazy.

You and I can afford our choices, you say. That's true, and it's the whole point. The working class can't afford to keep making the stupid choice.  Because unlike us they unlike us have no margin left.

People who can afford to be cynical about politics are people like you and me. Not the people starving in West Virginia.  They can't afford it.

They need a political answer, not resignation. And the answer is not "vote for the other party of the rich."

It is not to be a class traitor.

An independent political movement of the working class is the answer.  Built on the understanding that no capitalist party.  Democrat or Republican, will ever cure their conditions.  The only way out is to fight for their own interests, as a class, against both of them.

I'm not bashing poor people. I'm taking their situation more seriously than you are and calling it for what it is.

You've written them off as people who can't be expected to know better. I'm saying they've been robbed of the chance to know better and through despair or bad guidance they continue to make the same bad choice.  A robbery was committed by the very people who told them how to vote.  And the robbery is still in progress.