America's Problem is That White People Want It to Be a Failed State
Can America Solve the Problem of the White American Voter?
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Is America really ready to reclaim democracy?
I'm going to share a fact with you — and you're not going to like it.
America's problems can be reduced to the following. White Americans want America to be a failed state — and that is its fundamental, deep, and long standing problem. That is how America ended up here — more than half a century of white hostility to any kind of social progress whatsoever — which resulted in social collapse, and culminated in Trumpism. White people made America a failed state.
But are white people ready to own this problem, of their own extremism? Is that long-term social position really about to change this election, finally, after more than half a century? Are white Americans ready to become a modern, functioning society? The answer, right about now, is a kind of hysterical "yes!" We all — all of us sane and thoughtful people anyways — want Biden to win, and put an end to the long nightmare of the Trump years. But — despite what the polls might say — how realistic is that?
"Kill Umair! Get him!!!" Maybe you're foaming at the mouth, ready to dispute my simple fact. So take a hard look at the chart above. What does it say?
I have some bad news, and then I have some worse news. Don't worry, you'll thank me later. The first piece of bad news is this. Here's a fact that most people underestimate. America is still about 80% white. 80%. Given the record-breaking turnout, this election is going to be more about America's white majority than about minorities, probably, at least if every group turns out in record numbers roughly equally. Minorities have much less power than many imagine, precisely because they are still seriously in the…minority. This election is about white America, and if it really wants to live in a democracy — or if it's happier living in a fascist society.
You might think that sounds over the top, so here's the worse news. The chart above says this. It says that white Americans, as a group, have never, as a group, voted for a Democratic President. Never in modern history. In fact, the chart above in fact understates the problem. This trend goes back to JFK and perhaps before. Are you beginning to see the problem here? Why I say "America's problem is that white people want it to be a failed state?"
Let me make it clearer. White Americans can be relied on, in the majority, as a group, to "vote Republican." I put it in quotes because it's worth examining what that anodyne statement really means. Liberal, sane, thoughtful White Americans often overestimate how many of them there are, how widespread their cause is. The result is that when I say "Americans are…" meaning of course the majority, which is still white, I get a wave of protest. Americans aren't dumb! Americans aren't dumb! They're not violent, stupid racists! They want to live in a modern society! Are they, do they — at least the white majority? Let's take a brief and hard look at reality.
Here are some things white Americans have been for, as a group, in their majority. Segregation. Endless war. Inequality. Billionaires. Capital. Guns and religion as primary social values. That is what the voting pattern above means. Conversely, here are some thing white Americans have been against, as a group, in their majority. Desegregation. Civil rights. Womens' rights. Their own healthcare, retirement, and childcare. Public goods of any kind whatsoever. That is what the "voting pattern" above means in the real world. Need I go on? America's problem is that white Americans as a social group, its majority social group, want America to be a failed state. They don't want to live in a modern, civilised democracy, and never have.
White America is America's problem. A big, white, ignorant problem. The problem of the white American voter — that white Americans don't want to admit — goes back more than half a century at this point. If the answer is "Make America Great Again!" then the question is: "well, who brought it this point of self-destruction?" and the answer is….white Americans. They're the ones responsible for the self-destruction of the society they still rule as a massive majority. Nobody else is responsible for their poverty, despair, and humiliation but them. That is what the chart above makes crystal clear.
Who voted, over and over again, to have worse lives? No healthcare, retirement, affordable education, childcare — no public goods of any kind whatsoever? White Americans did. What the? The question baffles the world. Why would anyone choose a worse life? The answer is that white Americans would not accept a society of true equals. "I won't pay for those dirty, filthy peoples' educations, healthcare, retirements! Why, their grandparents were my grandpappy's slaves!" White Americans chose to retain power, supremacy, superiority, even in a failing society. They chose staying on top of decline and ruin, rather than prospering as equals.
Let me make that even clearer, by putting it in a global perspective. This is the part you're really not going to like.
White Americans are the rich world's most hostile, ignorant, violent, cruel, and selfish social group — by a very long way. "Voting conservative" after all doesn't mean nearly the same thing in Europe or Canada. There, even conservative parties agree on the basics — people should have healthcare, education, retirement, that the only point of the public purse isn't endless war and death machines. Conservatism in America is off the charts, and so "voting" that way carries a very different meaning. It means that White Americans are the rich world's most regressive, ignorant, and self-destructive political bloc — by such a long way that they might as well not be in the rich world at all.
I don't mean any of that as an insult, by the way. I mean it objectively, literally, factually. You'd think that by now White Americans would have figured out that voting against their own standards of living ever rising just because it meant black and brown people would have public goods too was…imbecilic. Especially watching Europe and Canada rise and prosper. They've had more than half a century to figure that out. But they still haven't. What else do you call the inability to learn from the world and history but…ignorance?
Do you know what the word imbecile means? Someone who can't look after themselves. But that's what has happened: white people are the ones who wrecked their very own lives, futures, and society — beginning the moment, decades back, that minorities finally gained a few rights, in a giant, stupid, endless, escalating temper tantrum, that culminated in Trumpism.
I know this sounds insulting. But to speak factually and empirically about levels of self-destruction this immense requires us to reach beyond the lines of everyday discourse. Let me try again, then.
White Americans really are different. From their peers — or at least the people they believe are their peers. But the truth that their political choices over decades reveals is this. White Americans have almost nothing in common with White Europeans or Canadians — who back the expansive social contracts of social democracies reliably. White Americans reliably reject such choices, which is how they made their society collapse. instead, they have more in common with the ethnic-religious-fundamentalist majorities of nations like Iran, or the authoritarian-nationalist majorities of nations like Russia. They are regressive, sectarian, fundamentalist, unable to change, trapped by their own ideologies.
That is how and why America collapsed. Black People didn't make it so. Brown People didn't. Native Americans didn't. America is still about 80% white, and white Americans make a certain choice reliably and consistently and predictably as a group — they vote "conservative," but conservative in America doesn't mean what it does in the rest of the rich world — it means something much more like Iran or Russia. Bang.
White Americans impoverished themselves, through decades of such folly. Voting against their very own basic public goods. Which meant they had to pay monopolists eye-watering prices for those very things which could and should have been socially provided — healthcare, higher education, retirement, and so on. Today, the average American dies in $62,000 of debt. Do you know what that predicted, a few years ago? A fascist implosion. When majorities grow impoverished, they turn even more regressive, violent, ignorant, and brutal. America's white majority was already all those things — and then they became even more so.
A demagogue came along, Trump, who blamed white America's problems on everyone but white Americans. Mexican babies. Black mothers. Latino immigrants. Syrian refugees. Gay minority couples. Everyone but white Americans was responsible for the plight of white Americans. But how could they be? America was and is still 80% white. Nobody was ever responsible for white America's stunning plunge into poverty, humiliation, and despair — but white America.
But nobody wants to blame themselves, do they? It's only human to project one's failings onto others. So white America took Trump's bait. And it was easier, too, to sell that line of nonsense, that racism, that prejudice, that bigotry, to a white majority that was already those things, and always had been. It was a self-reinforcing process, which was inevitable once America's white middle and working class began to implode. Fascism was coming to America.
Those of us who warned of it were called alarmists and hysterics and so on, when we warned of camps, genocide, bans, raids, purges. As all those things came to pass, and, sick to our stomachs, we survivors tried to warn all over again, we were mocked, shamed, and condemned. By white Americans. Even the good ones. We were told we were underestimating the power of white America to do the right thing.
But we understood something that white American never has about itself. White America has never done the right thing. Ever. At least not in modern history. White America, again, the chart shows us, has been for segregation and war and brutality — and against desegregation, women's rights, civil rights, and so on. White America, as a group, as a majority, has never, ever voted for anything even slightly towards greater equality, justice, freedom, for all. It has only ever voted to preserve, maintain, and expand its own power. Ever.
White Americans — the good and reasonable ones — overestimate their social group so badly that they probably imagine a majority of white people voted for Obama. Wrong. Even Obama couldn't win a majority of whites. The only candidate who came close was Bill Clinton — and even he failed. White Americans, again, never voted any way but fanatically "conservative", which, in global terms, means more like majorities in Iran or Russia than Canada or Europe — regressive, ignorant, brutal, hostile, selfish, and supremacist, not modern, gentle, fair, wise, sophisticated, thoughtful, peaceful, tolerant.
White America's escalating temper tantrum — its pattern of regressive voting — finally escalated in Trumpism. That is how all of America ended up here. Ruled by white America's fascists and fanatics, too. Which even the sane and thoughtful white Americans despair at. But will they finally understand themselves? Can they look in the mirror once and for all?
We survivors and scholars have seen all this before — the phenomenon of the deceptive majority. By "deceptive majority," I mean the idea that good and reasonable white Americans have about themselves. That as a majority, they are good and reasonable, and so goodness and sanity and reason will prevail in the end. They have not in America precisely because white Americans badly overestimate just how sane and reasonable their group in society is. How can they be, when they think guns matter more than healthcare and human rights?
I'm sorry if that sounds harsh. But again, I am only speaking to you factually, empirically, objectively. White Americans have voted over again and again for their guns and their Bibles — but they have never, ever voted as group to have healthcare or retirement for all or any single aspect of a functioning modern society whatsoever. Not to this day.
White America seemed to prefer supremacism and theocracy and authoritarian-fascism over modernity, as a social group. And that is how America ended up being a failed state. That, my friend, is the ugly and difficult fact.
That is the problem of the white American voter. And it spells real trouble.
Because when we say things like "Biden will win in a landslide!" what we are really saying is: white American as a group will, for the first time in modern history, not vote Republican. That they will, as a group, vote for something other than regressivism of the most extreme kind on offer. That the massive tide and force of history will suddenly turn on its head. That a decades long trend will simply reverse itself en masse, like never before.
We are asking for something greater than we may know — for history to deliver us a genuine transformation in long-standing political and social attitudes amongst a majority that has never, ever felt the way we wish them to. Who have never, ever been on the side of modernity or greater democracy or more civilization.
We are hoping for change of the deepest kind. Are we overconfident, then?
I'm not saying that a Biden landslide is impossible. But I am willing, at this stage, to call it unlikely. I don't think white America is suddenly going to reverse decades of history. I think history has a terrible momentum and inertia, which doesn't turn itself around so easily. I think social attitudes and political preferences don't simply magically upend themselves overnight. I don't think white America as a majority is going to back Biden. (If it does, it will be thanks to young people, though.)
Where does that leave us? Not in a very good place. The problem of the white American voter is very, very real. More real than white Americans know — which is precisely why their pundits and intellectuals never discuss it: they are giving their own social group's regressivism and imbecility a free pass. But it's the elephant in the room, just how different white Americans really are, as a group, in the majority, how regressive, cruel, hostile, ignorant, and backwards. That's not an opinion — it's a sad, terrible, frightening fact.
It's possible that minorities will deliver the election for Biden. That's if turnout for them is much, much higher than for whites. We don't know, really, if that's the case. I'd say while the chances are slim, they are very real.
More likely, though, is the following scenario. White America votes the way it always has as a group, as a majority — to screw everyone else over, as hard as possible, even if it itself pays a price. That will lead to three possible outcomes. One, an outright Trump victory. Two, a undecided election, which the Supreme Court will obviously hand to Trump. Or three, the most likely, in my estimation, months of chaos, as America tries to figure out what to do next, about the mess its in, and the GOP makes every grab for raw power.
And the protests of the good and thoughtful white Americans don't help: "not all of us!" Sure, Chet, not all of you. But enough of you have been like this for most of modern history. Embittered, hostile, cruel, backwards.
Is that about to change? I don't know, my friends. I doubt it, but I hope so. So why do I tell you this? Because we minorities are what we have always been: barely tolerated interlopers and hated intruders in the Promised Land. You, my white American friend, are the only one with the power to change any of it.
Umair
October 2020
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