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.
White supremacy is only effictive because people let it. For example, when black people have demands it usually results in a march. When white folks want something done, they hire a lobbyist. You don't have to guess which one is more effective. Again, white supremacy is what it is because we play the wrong game and continue to do so.
