We shouldn’t get to a place where there are people yelling from the rafters that because you have been successful, you are a bad person and we’re going to be punitive to you. That’s, to me, the antithesis of the spirit of the country.
Howard Schultz to an extremely bored audience
Howie, speaking for mostly everyone here, shut the fuck up already. Last week, most people barely knew who Howard Schultz, independent candidate for President, was. Now everyone does and the response to his anemic desire to make everyone nice to each other has been, uh, energetic to say the least.
It’s difficult to remember Schultz because he’s an empty suit vaguely resembling every other rich blowhard who gets trotted out as principled opposition to current political trends. For someone who was nearly Clinton’s Secretary of Labor pick, it’s very on-brand that he’s a man without a constituency, a lukewarm glass of old coffee sitting on the counter. His favorability polls right out of the gate stink like rotting meat, and he’s doing a bang-up job of being the only account on Twitter to be ratio’d for every post.
Fucking yikes.
Now, why such a strong reaction to what is essentially a predictable campaign? What did everyone across the political spectrum turn those noses to Schultz? He’s someone who traditionally would be predisposed to at least an insurgent campaign in some bellwether states: a wealthy white male businessman who helmed one of the most recognizable corporate brands in the country. Someone comfortable and used to power and privilege sliding into a new space would was actually considered to become one of its ascendants as part of a Cabinet. In fact, he was so above “politics” or however he defines it, he skipped out on voting plenty of times.
It’s because voters have undergone a fundamental shift in what they want. It’s celebrity, showmanship, theatrics of outsiders untainted by Beltway bullshit. Schultz has none of these qualities. If Trump is the dark carnival ringmaster of America’s ID, whipping up crowds into a frothing frenzy with racial resentment, Schultz is the boring step-dad telling them not to have any fun.
The Democratic Party faithful have nothing but contempt for third party candidates, seeing their voting base as a captured audience. Democrats don’t feel like they need to earn your votes, they deserve them and any third party votes are seen as betrayal or a type of thoughtcrime. The popularity of lefty Democrats with actual politics in this atmosphere is not surprising.
Schultz, on the other hand, represents nearly everything everyone hates about modern politics and the upper class: privileged, pedantic, lecturing figures who tell us to sacrifice while they move billions overseas to not pay taxes. Out-of-touch yet demanding our fealty. Their whining about civility and discourse. Their demanding that we live with less so they can have more. After the Iraq War, Afghanistan, the financial meltdown caused by billionaire’s greed, decades of austerity, the failure of the system to prevent an authoritarian psychopath from ascending? People are just fucking tired of this.
The only reaction that a rational person should have to Schultz’s candidacy is pure revulsion; a bitter, cold hatred for who he is and what he represents. Not just that he might spoil a particular candidate, but that he feels like he has any authority or presumption to run at all.
A billionaire is a thing that should not exist. Howard shouldn’t exist. His lifestyle is a walking, talking crime that became a real boy. We should not have to tolerate him boring us to death. I should not have to write this fucking article. He needs to stop wasting everyone’s time and drop this obnoxious vanity project.
He has no constituency of any size, only suburban Republicans repulsed by Trump, and media talking heads who just want to feel special again. 70% of his wealth is not nearly enough that we have to be subjected to his bloviating horseshit centrist pitch to no one but a baker’s dozen car wash owners in Missouri. He only appeals to neocons who jerk off to the pro-military porn in Transformers movies, and they all deserve to be shot into the sun just like him.
NO ONE WANTS YOU, HOWARD. No one even likes your burnt coffee that tastes like battery acid. And just like Starbucks, I guess we just have to put up with you on every street corner for a while. After the failure of the Obama administration’s and Hillary Clinton’s pointless compromise pandering and tone policing, we got the nihilist, stupid chaos of Trump. And if you think Schultz would not support everything Trump supports, watch the next episode of Brooklyn Bridge Sellers on HGTV.
People have it hard enough. They work longer hours for shit pay, piled with debt, and don’t deserve to be subjected to Daddy Starbucks piss and fucking endlessly moan about decency and civility. No. People who have to live through this constant grind of making less, having to do more, with less time do not need to be civil or nice or polite to the very same people causing their stress. They need to be the opposite. They need to be angry and activated and aware of who the enemy is. This is open class war on the people who physically make this economy function.
You hear that sound, Howie? It’s the sharpening of pitchforks. The last thing working people want to hear when they get home is someone who’s grotesquely rich complaining they don’t work hard enough, or that they should stop saying swears. Keep it up, keep antagonizing a growing collection of people who may realize they have *nothing* to lose. You may find yourself not liking the results very much.
This obsession with “decency” and “civility” is an aesthetic one, a tired lecturing to return to a time that never existed. It’s a desire for the outcomes; austerity, grinding poverty for millions, a permanent alienated underclass, but done with professionalism and tact. What we are experiencing now in the Trump noosphere is ideology without euphemism, the quiet part said loud. Like Marco Rubio and John Bolton opening calling for Venezuelan coup in exchange for their oil.
His whole shtick of wanting people to come together, thinking both parties are at the extreme is hilarious considering a wealth hoarder and mass exploiter can dare consider himself “moderate”. To come together for what exactly? He wants an end to “revenge politics”. What the fuck does this even mean? Is it about personality? Is it a policy thing? He stands for nothing except a calm status quo, because he wants nothing but a calm status quo. It’s class interest above all. He desperately wants to define inappropriate behavior for everyone but himself.
“Centrism” and “moderate” are terms that do not represent some imaginary space between liberal and conservative, false indicating politics exist on a binary scale. Marxists like myself do not consider ourselves liberals despite being regularly lumped in with a rightwing, capitalist Democratic Party. The big distinction for Marxists is far more material: capital vs worker, pro and anti-capitalism. Schultz occupies a space that seeks to insulate his own disgusting wealth.
His big enemy? The national debt; an issue so obviously used in bad faith to justify any sort of genocidal austerity campaigns to weed out the herd. His policies that he represents? Vicious, brutal, but woke class war. He wants to cut Social Security and Medicare, slash social spending, opposing high marginal tax rates on thieves like him, and opposes Medicare-For-All. He just doesn’t want to send you to a segregated workhouse. Listen to Beyonce blasting while you assemble Apple iBrains so Instagram influencers can livestream their wet dreams.
Schultz is a nakedly awful class warrior who wants to reduce everyone to rubble so they stay quiet, under control, and vulnerable. All in service of avoiding any sort of conflict or ideological battle. Hardly moderate and hardly center, except the center of “hunts homeless for sport” and “takes baths in white rhino blood to ensure virility”.
It must be a unique feeling to be so wealthy, powerful, and respected by the business community, then step out onto the public stage and have every normal jackoff tear you apart relentlessly. Good, keep doing this, America. Give them no rest. That must feel like whiplash to poor ol’ Howie. He finds himself in a unique moment in time when idiots like this are being knocked down to size, identified for what they are: thieves, mass exploiters, and the enemy of our time.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.