I’ve mentioned in this space on several occasions how much respect I have for the writing of Thomas B. Edsall. He’s a political journalist who tends to base his reporting not on following the horse race, but on deep data dives and academic analyses. Even if you don’t agree with his columns — he’s a liberal — he’s always worth reading. That said, I really disagree with today’s New York Times column by Edsall, whose error is quite typical of liberal opinion, I’m afraid. Let me explain.

In it, Edsall frames our current politics as a struggle between “race liberalism and race conservatism.” What does he mean by this? Well, this:

As African-Americans and other racial minorities increasingly occupy positions of influence and authority in American society, they also face backlash from those on the right whose opposition to ceding power is fierce, whether their opposition is veiled or out in the open. This opposition is now lodged solidly in the contemporary Republican Party, and the two parties regularly confront each other with rising intensity over the issue.

How about that: white people resent black people rising up in society, which explains conservatism today. I know this is received gospel among progressives and liberals, but let’s step back from it for a second.

The assumption running throughout Edsall’s analysis is that the only thing that can explain white resistance to contemporary left-wing racial politics is racism. But there is a mountain of evidence that liberals have to ignore for this explanation to be true. For example, this summer, one of the top-selling books is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, which purports to explain how white people, when they disagree with progressive challenges on racial matters, are really behaving in pathological ways.

Is there any demographic group who would stand for being told that to object to descriptions of them as bad (as a group), and deserving of punishment is a sign of how sick and frightened they are? It is impossible to imagine a book called Black Fragility, or Latino Fragility. The left politicizes and pathologizes the condition of being white, and there is Tom Edsall, blaming whites who don’t agree with this as resentful.

The literature and media of the left these days is filled with condemnations of “whiteness.” Again, the idea that people who see themselves routinely denounced for the color of their skin, and their culture, must accept these racist insults and attempts to disempower and dispossess them, or stand guilty of racism — it’s absurd. But this is how liberals see it.

Edsall writes:

Among its findings:

• Black household income grew from 1980 to 2018 by over $11,000 annually in inflation adjusted dollars, but whites did even better. In 2,018, “for every dollar earned by the typical white household, the typical Black household earned only 59 cents. This is significantly worse than in 2000, when the typical Black household earned about 65 cents for every dollar earned by a White household.”

• Racial disparities are largest for the most successful: both the racial pay-gap and the racial wealth gap are “largest for college graduates.” Whites with degrees made $60,000 in 2018 compared with $49,000 for African-Americans.

• Less than “half of Black families own their homes (42 percent), compared with nearly three-quarters of white families (73 percent). This is a significant decline from the peak Black homeownership rate of 49 percent in 2004.”

You would have to be hard-hearted not to recognize the suffering of Black America, and not to sympathize with how far behind it is falling. The problem that so many liberals have is that they assume, à la Ibram X. Kendi, that any disparity between blacks and whites can only have been caused by white supremacy.

Take these figures above. Why are black households earning less? Does it have to do with education? Does it have to do with the kinds of professional fields white people tend to go into, versus those that attract black graduates? If blacks aren’t getting the kind of education that prepares them for more lucrative fields, why is that? You could say “racism,” and maybe you would be right. But you should also look at the state of the black family. According to Afro.com’s 2016 breakdown of US Census data:

The percentage of White children under 18 who live with both parents almost doubles that of Black children, according to the data. While 74.3 percent of all White children below the age of 18 live with both parents, only 38.7 percent of African-American minors can say the same.

Instead, more than one-third of all Black children in the United States under the age of 18 live with unmarried mothers—compared to 6.5 percent of White children. The figures reflect a general trend: During the 1960-2016 period, the percentage of children living with only their mother nearly tripled from 8 to 23 percent and the percentage of children living with only their father increased from 1 to 4 percent.

Social scientists have long espoused the benefits for children who live in two-parent homes, including economic, educational, health and other advantages.

There is no government policy that can compensate for the advantages living in an intact family gives a child. But liberals are so afraid of being accused of “blaming the victim” that they refuse to consider this massive factor that could account for the relative lack of black economic progress.

Similarly, on the question of why whites with degrees make more on average than blacks, it might be racism. We have to consider that possibility seriously. But we also should consider the kinds of professions that college educated blacks enter, versus whites. Blacks are notably underrepresented in the ranks of law, medicine, and technology, among the most lucrative professions.

They are also underrepresented in journalism — not a lucrative profession at all, but the one I’m most familiar with. I can tell you that the journalism industry obsesses — the word is not too strong — over the lack of minorities in the field, and tries really hard to recruit them. But you can’t create journalists out of nothing. If black college students aren’t interested in journalism, they won’t study journalism, and won’t go into the field. I haven’t looked at these studies since I left mainstream journalism in 2010, but prior to that, it was well established by studies that for whatever reason, black and Latino households in the US had much lower readership of newspapers. If reading the paper or paying close attention to the news wasn’t a habit in your household, it stands to reason that you are much less likely to consider journalism as a profession.

Why wouldn’t this be true for other professions? I’m just saying that there are probably factors other than racism that account for these distressing figures. And as far as black home ownership, if blacks on the whole are doing poorly economically, of course they’re not going to be able to afford homes. I bet the loss of good working-class factory jobs in outsourcing has put black working class people in the same boat as white working-class people — unable to afford to buy a home. I could be wrong, but if so, that is a structural economic explanation for the home ownership difference, not a racial one.

But liberals today prefer one explanation for every racial difference: white supremacy. This is what Ibram X. Kendi espouses in his wildly popular How To Be Antiracist — but as the black linguist John McWhorter says in his review, this is an absurdly reductionist binary that can’t possibly explain the complexities of the world.

Yet the column of a sophisticated political observer like Tom Edsall seems to assume that it’s axiomatic. He writes:

Fanning the flames of racial animosity lies at the core of Trump’s election strategy, as it did in 2016.

This is incredibly frustrating. I don’t doubt that Trump’s strategy involves taking advantage of white racial anxieties, but it really requires a massive dose of liberal Kool-Aid to blame Republicans for “fanning the flames of racial animosity.” Last week we learned that at Sandia National Laboratories, white executives were subjected to mandatory training that was astonishingly racist.Seriously, follow that link to see the leaked instruction materials. Again, the gaslighting that liberals like Tom Edsall are engaged in is designed to blame whites, and white conservatives, for objecting to their own demonization by the left. From my point of view, the left, especially in the media, are the primary forces “fanning the flames of racial animosity.” I mean, good grief — Edsall writes for a newspaper that published a big, Pulitzer-winning project claiming that the entire foundation of the American republic was based on preserving slavery! Right now, his own paper is promoting a popular podcast whose fundamental premise is that white parents are responsible for the problems in the New York City public education system. The epistemic closure here is just epic.

More from Edsall’s column:

“Race relations and racism have emerged as a focus of American politics in the last twenty years unlike at any time since the Civil Rights movement,” Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, wrote in an email.

He went on:

The lack of progress in the incorporation and equalization of African Americans is the broad background condition, put into ever starker relief in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The rise of white Evangelicals on the Republican side — with white Christian churches being one of the most racially segregated sectors of voluntary associations — has profoundly deepened the racial divide.

Here’s news: black Christian churches are also one of the most racially segregated sectors of voluntary associations too. Are they therefore racist? Of course not. I’ve written here in the past about how different patterns in black and white churchgoing did certainly arise out of segregation, but that today, you can’t blame their persistence on continuing racism. Any white person who has ever worshiped at a black church knows that there is a huge difference in worship style from the comparatively sedate white churches. I went to a black Catholic funeral last year, and was impressed by how gospelly the service was. Though the liturgy was Catholic, the music and the sensibility was strongly black — and that was a beautiful thing to see. In Protestant churches, though, it would be very hard to imagine a black Christian giving up that worship and preaching style for what’s on offer at white churches. Similarly, if you were raised in white Protestant churches, you may find it hard to relate to how black American Christians worship. There’s nothing racist about any of this. It’s not a coincidence that the most integrated churches in America are those in the Pentecostal and charismatic tradition, in which the worship style is far more akin to what is normative in black churches.

In my own case, I have spent my entire adult life as a Christian in either the Catholic or Orthodox churches. There is no way that I could ever be comfortable worshiping at a Protestant church, white or black. I don’t mean that in any negative way about Protestants — it’s just how I have been formed intellectually and otherwise about what worship is.

I think it far more likely that Kitschelt is looking at all-white Evangelical congregations and concluding that ah-ha, they must be keeping blacks out! Prior to the 1970s, that would (alas) not have been an unfair guess, though it still would have been the case that American whites and American blacks, because of historical circumstances — including slavery and Jim Crow — developed very different traditions within Christianity. But today? To say it’s about nothing other than racism is far too simplistic — though that judgment does confirm the liberal narrative about race.

This part of Edsall’s column is indisputable:

Over the past three-plus decades, the Democratic Party has been on the leading edge of change, one step or more ahead of the nation as a whole.

Democrats have become decisively more liberal, especially on cultural issues; more dependent on states on the East and West Coasts; more diverse; more ideologically orthodox, less religious, less white; and in many cases more highly educated.

“The race and religion gap jumps out to me, specifically white Christians vs. everyone else,” Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, wrote in an email describing how the parties have changed in recent decades.

While “the Republican Party doesn’t look terribly different than it did in the 1980s: about 88 percent were white Christians in 1984; in 2018, it’s still 75 percent.”

In contrast, the Democrats have changed radically, Burge continued: “About 68 percent of Democrats were white Christians in 1984, today it’s 38 percent.”

From 1991 to 2018, the share of Democrats who describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated has grown from 10 percent to 38 percent. While a majority of Democrats say they believe in God, the party has become the home of nonbelievers.

But here we go again with a liberal double standard:

In an interview with The Times, Robert P. Jones, founder and C.E.O. of the Public Religion Research Institute, described in blunt terms the underlying rationale for the alliance between the Republican Party and white evangelicals: “The new culture war is not abortion or same-sex marriage, the new culture war is about preserving a white, Christian America,” Jones said, adding

That’s what Trump’s really leading with. The “Make America Great Again” thing — the way that was heard by most white evangelical Protestants, white working-class folks, was saying: “I’m going to preserve the composition of the country.”

In an email, Jones wrote

As the Republican Party has continued to remain fairly homogeneous and has organized itself, fueled by decades of deploying the so-called Southern Strategy, around a politics of white racial grievances, the Democratic Party has become the default party for those who do not share those grievances and has come to more closely reflect the changing demographics of the country. As a result, the Democratic coalition, in terms of race and religion, is notably more diverse today than it was when Biden first ran for president in 1988. And issues of religious and racial identity are more salient today in defining the partisan divides.

When people of color want to preserve their neighborhoods, it’s called “fighting gentrification.” Nobody objects when people of color seek political advantage in racial or ethnic terms. But when whites want to do it, it’s “white racial grievances.” For years I’ve been saying in this space that the rising left-wing obsession with identity politics — as opposed to old-fashioned, MLK-style liberalism — is going to call up real demons among white people. You cannot stir, politicize, and hallow racial consciousness among people of color and expect it not to have the same effect on white people.

The British political scientist Eric Kaufmann has written about how it’s perfectly normal to expect white people in the US, as they decline demographically relative to non-whites, to start behaving politically like all other racial groups have. In this 2019 interview with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker, he explained his view. Excerpts:

For all these reasons, Kaufmann—whose book has been hailed by intellectuals such as Andrew Sullivan and Tyler Cowen—believes that politicians must accept and even accommodate white grievances. “If politics in the West is ever to return to normal rather than becoming even more polarized, white interests will need to be discussed,” he writes. “In an era of unprecedented white demographic decline it is absolutely vital for it to have a democratic outlet.” Kaufmann says that “politicians should set [immigration] levels that respect the cultural comfort zone of the median voter,” and he is open to the possibility of long-term refugee camps and a border wall to placate native majorities. He also thinks that liberals should be more tolerant of those who openly express pride in their whiteness.

More:

You write, “If politics in the West is ever to return to normal rather than becoming even more polarized, white interests will need to be discussed. I realize this is very controversial for left-modernists. Yet not only is white group self-interest legitimate, but I maintain that in an era of unprecedented white demographic decline it is absolutely vital for it to have a democratic outlet.” Can you say a little bit more about what specifically you’re arguing for?

Yes. Part of this comes from a view that what’s ultimately behind the rise of right-wing populism are these ethnic-majority grievances, particularly around their decline, and that ultimately this is about nostalgia and attachment to a way of life or to a particular traditional ethnic composition of a nation. Wanting for that not to erode too quickly is the motivation. I think the survey data show that it’s much more about that than about material things, for example, or even fears. It’s about attachment to one’s own group rather than hatred of other groups. This is an important distinction. The survey data from the American National Elections Study show that whites who feel very warmly toward whites are not any more cold toward, say, African-Americans, than whites who aren’t very warm toward whites.

When you say that “white interests” will need to be discussed in politics, I presume you acknowledge that the interests of white people are generally taken into account as much as any group, if not more than other groups. Do you mean explicitly discussed?

There should be an equal treatment of groups in the cultural sphere. There’s no question whites are advantaged economically, politically. I’m not going to dispute that. But in the cultural sphere, on immigration, the group whose numbers have declined, or who experienced a more rapid sense of change and loss due to migration, are the white majority. If, for example, they’re saying, “We would like to have a slower rate of change to enable assimilation to take place,” I think that’s actually a legitimate cultural interest. It doesn’t mean that it should drive policy. I think a moderate group self-interest is fine.

This is seen as toxic, as expressed by a majority group, but when minorities express these interests, that’s seen as quite normal. I think that when it comes to white liberals, there tends to be a double standard, as there is with white conservatives, by the way, when it comes to groups expressing their self-interest.

One more excerpt:

You see what he did there? I don’t see how anybody can deny that racism exists, and that it is evil. But if you don’t agree with this radical, illiberal-left definition of race and racism, then you are therefore against full equality for black people. Good grief.

And Edsall has the nerve to blame Republicans for “fanning the flames of racial animosity”! The gaslighting is strong with these people. I would refer Edsall back to this December 2017 New York Times column written by Thomas B. Edsall, who said then:

Many Democrats continue to have little understanding of their own role — often inadvertent, an unintended consequence of well-meaning behavior — in creating the conditions that make conservatives willing to support Trump and the party he is leading.

I asked Karen Stenner, the author of “The Authoritarian Dynamic” and no fan of the president, for her explanation of the political dynamic in the current struggle between left and right. She emailed back:

Consider some of the core features of our ideal liberal democracy: absolutely unfettered freedom and diversity; acceptance and promotion of multiculturalism; allowing retention of separate identities; maintenance of separate communities, lifestyles and values; permitting open criticism of leaders, authorities and institutions; unrestrained free expression (of what many will consider offensive/outrageous/unacceptable ideas); strict prohibitions on government intervention in ‘private’ moral choices.

In fact, Stenner argues, these values are the subject of intense debate. They lie at the core of what divides America:

These reflect some of the fundamental fault lines of human conflict and are unlikely ever to be resolved or settled because we can’t just be socialized or educated out of our stances on these issues, as they are the product of deep-seated, largely heritable predispositions that cause us to vary in our preference for and in our ability to cope with freedom and diversity, novelty and complexity, vs oneness and sameness.

Not only are the values that the left takes for granted heatedly disputed in many sections of the country, the way many Democratic partisans assert that their values supplant or transcend traditional beliefs serves to mobilize the right.

Stenner makes the point that

liberal democracy’s allowance of these things inevitably creates conditions of “normative threat,” arousing the classic authoritarian fears about threats to oneness and sameness, which activate those predispositions — about a third of most western populations lean toward authoritarianism — and cause the increased manifestation of racial, moral and political intolerance.

More:

In addition to the economic setbacks experienced in heavily Republican regions of the country, [Eric] Schnurer, himself a liberal, argues that blue America has over the last decade declared war on the “red way of life.”

He makes a case very similar to Stenner’s:

The political, economic, and cultural triumph nationwide of a set of principles and realities essentially alien to large numbers of Americans is viewed as (a) being imposed upon them, and (b) overturning much of what they take for granted in their lives — and I don’t think they’re wrong about that. I think they’ve risen in angry revolt, and now intend to give back to the “elite” in the same terms that they’ve been given to. I don’t think this is good — in fact, I think it’s a very dangerous situation — but I think we need to understand it in order to responsibly address it.

Or, you can just call them a bunch of right-wing racist troglodytes. That seems to be the go-to explanation on the left today. It’s frustrating to see a journalist as careful as Tom Edsall fall into it. For the record, I should say that I believe in the old-fashioned liberal vision, by which people ought to be judged by the content of their character, and under which racially discriminatory barriers to access should be demolished. My disdain for white racial consciousness is why the alt-right calls me a cuck. My disdain for wokeness is why progressives call me a racist. What a weird place to be in, innit?

One more thing: I apologize for the f-bomb below — in fact, I’m going to put the image beneath the jump so you don’t have to see it if you don’t want to — but this old cartoon from Spy magazine characterizes the Democratic Party’s, and liberalism’s, appeal to non-woke whites. Imagine a slightly different version that says, “Can I have your vote so I can enact this view of you into law and public policy?”