fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

White Civil War

What if American politics in 2019 is mostly an intra-tribal conflict between whites?
Screen Shot 2019-07-26 at 2.01.34 PM

David Brooks takes note of the fact that the most far-left section of the Democratic electorate are educated white people. Excerpts:

To say that white educated Democrats have moved left is true, but it’s not the essential truth. The bigger truth is that this segment is now more likely to see politics through a racial lens. Racial equity has become the prism through which many in this group see a range of other issues.

For example, immigration is now seen through the lens of race, in a way that simply wasn’t true two decades ago. As Zach Goldberg noted in an essay in Tablet Magazine, between 1965 and 2000, the percentage of white liberals who wanted higher immigration levels never deviated far from 10 percent. During the Obama administration, the number rose to the range of 20 to 30 percent. Now, more than 50 percent of white progressives want to see higher immigration levels.

Many progressives see barriers to immigration as akin to unjust racial barriers. Many want to dismantle the border enforcement agencies and eliminate criminal sanctions against undocumented crossings precisely because they are seen as structures of oppression that white people impose on brown people.

More:

In this new dispensation, the concept of white privilege is on everybody’s lips. As Goldberg points out, in 1996 and 2010 about a quarter of white liberals thought racial discrimination was a very serious problem. By 2016, 58 percent did. White liberals have warmer attitudes toward other races than they do toward their own.

In this dispensation, more white progressives view society as basically unjust. In last year’s Hidden Tribes survey, for example, 86 percent of progressive activists said that people’s life outcomes are outside their individual control.

This shift in outlook has yielded several paradoxes. As many researchers have pointed out, white progressives are now farther left on immigration and race and diversity issues than the typical Hispanic or African-American voter.

Second, two of the great marks of privilege in our society are skin color and education levels, and yet in the Democratic Party it’s the highly educated whites who express the greatest alienation with the system that benefits them so directly.

Third, the progressive framework is egalitarian, but the shift has opened up wider opinion and cultural gaps between this highly educated elite and less educated groups.

Read it all. 

Don’t miss Times columnist Thomas Edsall’s long, meaty piece analyzing the Democratic Party as composed of three separate electorates, all of whom will be difficult to satisfy. Edsall is always a must read, because he does a deep dive into politics at a granular level.

These findings are no surprise at all to people like me, whose main sources of news include The New York Times and National Public Radio. The obsession with race and immigration — with only one side of the stories represented — is rivaled only by the obsessions with LGBT (again, only one perspective allowed). It explains too why the media are so out of touch with how ordinary Americans think about race and immigration: not just because the media ranks are overstuffed with liberals, but with white liberals.

Brooks ends like this:

For me, it’s a good idea to assume that people adopt their positions for honest, well-intentioned reasons. The crucial question then becomes: When is the racial lens (with its implied charge of racism against those who disagree) the right lens to use and when is it not? When does it illuminate an issue and when does it conceal?

This brings to mind something that happened when I was in an undergraduate opinion-writing class in the 1980s. In college, I was fairly liberal, and a volunteer for Amnesty International. In my Amnesty work, I noticed that we were writing a number of letters on behalf of prisoners of conscience in Africa — not just prisoners in apartheid South Africa, but in countries ruled by black Africans. Long story short: the more I dug, the more I realized that viewing Africa itself as a continent rife with tribal conflict — and that South Africa was a matter of the white tribes (mostly the Boers) dominating the black tribes, in a similar way that ruling black tribes dominated weaker black tribes in black-ruled countries. The wickedness and injustice of the South African example was clear to us on the outside, because it literally was a case of white vs. black (and, of course, it was connected to colonialism).

I wrote an op-ed piece for the class in which I applied this analysis to the apartheid issue. In no way did I defend apartheid, which I, of course, deplored. Rather, I simply suggested that examining the issue through the lens of general African tribal conflict could offer us a new and potentially more fruitful way to understand the apartheid phenomenon, and how the international community might move South Africa away from apartheid without the whole thing blowing up into a race war.

One of my classmates — a liberal black guy — was furious at that. I mean furious — he was physically repulsed, as I recall. He couldn’t even argue against my case. The idea that the apartheid issue could be examined in any way other than the lens provided by the Civil Rights struggle in the US was, to him, nothing more than a defense of apartheid. It was an extremely uncomfortable moment. Rather than argue what I proposed in my paper — an argument that might well have been wrong — I had to argue that I was not an ally of the Botha government. Everyone else in that small class was white, and in my recollection, nobody else wanted to speak up, because nobody wanted the black guy — who was a good guy, let me emphasize — to judge them as racist.

I remind you that I was at that time still a Democrat, one who volunteered for Amnesty International. But by violating the rigid code of how we talk about and understand race (in South Africa, at that!), I basically declared myself to be Sen. Jesse Helms’s valet. What happened in that classroom that day was that the racial lens — in particular, the lens of the US Civil Rights movement — was used that day in the classroom not to clarify the situation in South Africa, but to obscure our understanding of it.

I think something like that is happening now in our country regarding race and immigration. In the public square, the worst thing you can be is a racist (or more broadly, a bigot). Liberals — white liberals, in particular — control the discourse in media and academia, which is why it is common to see courses, articles, and reports damning “white privilege,” “white male privilege,” “whiteness,” and so forth. The other day, driving around listening to NPR, I heard a lengthy interview with a black man, conducted by a white liberal (a fact I know because I have been listening to this particular journalist for many years), that was full of the kinds of racially-charged statements that no NPR reporter would have allowed a white interview subject to get away with without challenge. The white liberal reporter had completely internalized the narrative that David Brooks discusses in his column.

I am sure that this reporter has absolutely no idea that she has done this. I would bet anything that she regards herself as a neutral arbiter. The racial double standard that she embodied — allowing a black interview subject to make racially loaded remarks about whites that she would never have allowed a white to make unchallenged — made me so angry I turned the radio off. In fact, I well remember the last time I did that: on a Sunday morning, driving to pick up my son from college for church. There was a series of NPR reports about immigration and the caravan. One allows for a certain liberal bias at NPR, but these reports were off the charts.

I know, I know: NPR and The New York Times are liberal. Dog bites man. Film at 11. I’m not interested in making the usual conservative claim about liberal media bias. What interests me is what seems to draw Brooks to the data about white liberals: that they have radicalized on racial issues (of which immigration is a subset here), even beyond where racial minorities are. One result of this: they see whites who don’t share their radical views as racist. No wonder so many in the media can’t see or understand anything complex about Americans’ racial views. It’s all Good vs. Evil.

I’m thinking about a situation I had a few years back, in which a group of white Evangelical college students, with whom I had had a good relationship, blackballed me when I wanted to interview them for a project I was working on, one that had nothing to do with race. I couldn’t understand what had happened. I had been with them once, and had a great time. Suddenly they wouldn’t talk to me. Someone involved with the group confided that I had written something critical of a pastor who had delivered a controversial sermon extolling Black Lives Matter (I had questioned whether the racialism in the sermon could be reconciled with the Gospel) — and that caused the white Evangelical college students to treat me as radioactive. I have no idea if these students were conservative or liberal, but it was striking to me that the issue of Black Lives Matter was so central to them that they construed even questioning the narrative as racist on its face. So racist, in fact, that they didn’t even want to talk about it.

Mind you, this was before Trump! Again, I don’t know if these educated young white adults counted themselves as liberals or conservatives, but in the sociological data Brooks cites, I see those kids. Brooks again:

The bigger truth is that this segment [white educated Democrats] is now more likely to see politics through a racial lens. Racial equity has become the prism through which many in this group see a range of other issues.

I’m going to repeat this so you don’t miss it: according to the data, white liberals think more highly of other races than they do their own people. That is extraordinary. It doesn’t take a political genius to see how that stance can distort one’s ability to see what is happening in this country. If everything is an example of racism, or an exercise of white privilege, then the kind of white people who don’t share the extreme racialized views of educated white liberals are likely to quit listening to allegations that they are racist — because they will come to read these allegations not as a description of the world as it is, or as it might be, but as nothing more than white liberal self-hatred projected onto the kind of white people they consider to be deplorables.

(Incidentally, sociologist Eric Kaufmann’s new book Whiteshift, which I haven’t yet read, seems to propose a framework for understanding racial conflict in the emerging majority-minority America in terms generally like I proposed in that apartheid op-ed — that is, according to a tribal conflict model — versus the familiar one.)

One last thing. Brooks writes:

in the Democratic Party it’s the highly educated whites who express the greatest alienation with the system that benefits them so directly.

You never see white people like this volunteering to give up their places within the meritocracy to people of color. What many of them are doing is finding a way to process the guilt they feel over their own place in the meritocracy, by affirming PC ideology, and by making sure other white people — not them, never them — have to pay the price. The class divide among whites in America — a divide that manifests itself primarily in cultural conflict — is under-explored.

Finally, I am reminded of an observation that Hannah Arendt made in her 1951 classic The Origins Of Totalitarianism. Here she’s talking about European elites (presumably Germans) between the wars, and how their behavior paved the way for totalitarianism. She writes that they were so disgusted by where respectable liberal, bourgeois society had done — that is, it had led to World War I — that they developed contempt for liberal norms. Arendt:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

She’s talking here about elites who dallied with fascism and communism, delighting in the wreckage of norms. I read that recently, as part of my research for my next book, and thought about both the liberal elites today who have gone over to embrace extreme social justice ideology, which refutes liberal norms; and the white Trumpenproles, who have embraced him, and Trump’s destruction of liberal norms.

Put another way, it appears that the core drama of American politics in 2019 is an intra-tribal civil war between whites.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now