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What's the Matter with White Folks?

by Tim Wise
3.21.05

IT ALMOST GOES WITHOUT SAYING that most of the analysis offered up by mainstream commentators in the wake of the presidential election has been largely devoid of substance.

For example, the persistent claim that President Bush’s re-election was the result of a “moral values” revolt by Christians has been seriously overblown. After all, Bush actually received more votes from those who said terrorism was the most important issue than he did from those who identified moral values as the key to their electoral behavior.

Likewise has been the quadrennial drivel spewing from the mouth of Al From and his cronies at the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), to the effect that if the Democrats would just move further to the right they would find themselves on the winning end of election night outcomes.

After years of following this advice, the Democratic Party has lost ground in the Senate, the House and in states across the country. Indeed, most of the Democrats who have been ousted in the past decade have been precisely those, especially in the South, who never ran or governed as progressives but rather hewed most closely to the Republican line.

But what has been even more distressing than the predictably off-base analysis served up by the DLC and the chattering class on Sunday morning talk shows has been the equally simplistic diagnosis of the Democrats’ problems provided by the liberal-left and progressives.

Whether in the form of a Nation or American Prospect editorial, a Jim Hightower screed, or the writings of best-selling author Thomas Frank (What’s the Matter With Kansas?), the prescription is the same: All the Dems need to do is develop a good old-fashioned populist appeal, whereby they point out the economic self-interests of voters who have moderate incomes and yet vote 
for Republicans—candidates whom they should, according to these pundits, view as their class enemies.

Actually, this is pretty much the same thing said by all segments of the left every election year. Just as the DLC says the Democratic Party should move right and abandon its working-class roots, the left says it should do the opposite, moving to an explicitly class-based politics. While this suggestion may be more effective than that offered up by the DLC, it too has serious flaws and would be unlikely to succeed, at least as expressed by those making the case. For one obvious reason, it’s foolish for us to expect such a move from the Democratic Party, seeing as how they don’t want fundamental change any more than Republicans do. But as progressive movement activists we need to be fluid in our understandings of power, particularly with regard to class populism, if we want to build hope in place of cynicism.

The color of “false consciousness”

The reasons for the likely inadequacy of class-based appeals are varied, but must be examined if those pushing for their adoption hope to prevail in future political struggles. To begin with, it must be recognized that to a large extent, some voters are already voting their self-interests, and need no hand-holding or persuasion to do so in the future.

At least 70% of people of color, for example, voted against the president; 89% of African Americans did so. Likewise, union households voted overwhelmingly for Bush’s removal, as did voters earning less than $30,000 annually.

So, which voters could we say were, as Thomas Frank might put it, ignoring their class interests? Who are the people who have, in Frank’s terms, become vulnerable to “wedge issues…whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns?”

Though Frank is loath to say it—and pretty much everyone else in the mainstream has ignored it as well—the answer is simple. The problem is white people, by and large: especially white folks in the “anxious middle class,” whose incomes are vulnerable though not terribly low (between $30,000 and $50,000 a year), but who are certainly closer to the working class than the wealthy whose candidate they tend to vote for. It is only these folks who seem to ignore their class interests and vote Republican.

The racial electoral divide, indeed, is larger than any of the others about which we constantly hear discussion. So, for example, the oft-mentioned gender gap this year was only 7 points, and the gap between those earning $30,000-50,000 and those earning $100,000-150,000 was only 8 points. Meanwhile, the gap between whites and people of color was a whopping 28 points—even greater than the 21-point gap dividing those with incomes between $15,000-30,000 and those with incomes above $200,000.

The white/black divide was 47 points: a modern record, in large part because Bush increased his vote among whites by 4 percentage points, capturing 58% of all white votes cast, including 62% of white men and 55% of white women.

The racial voting gap was especially pronounced among evangelical Christians. This is particularly important given the inane pronouncements about how evangelicals were responsible for Bush’s victory.

Fact is, only white evangelicals elevate their provincial moral concerns above classical conceptions of self-interest. Black evangelicals—a sizable group to be sure—voted against Bush by margins of anywhere from 6 or 7 to 1, despite often agreeing with his politics on certain issues like abortion, gay rights or prayer in schools. But 78% of white evangelicals and “born-again Christians” voted for Bush, a huge increase from the 62% average received by the Republican candidate in the two previous presidential contests.

The racial divide was far more salient than the mythical “red state, blue state” dichotomy pushed by the media. Though it has been scarcely mentioned since election day, whites voted mostly for Bush, even in the blue states (including New York, California and Illinois), while people of color in the red states largely voted for Kerry.

Bottom line—interracial voting differences were far greater than differences based on geography, gender, income, level of education, age, occupational status, religion or any other factor, raising the obvious and unasked question: Why?

Why do white folks vote so differently from people of color? Why do white evangelicals vote so differently from evangelicals of color? Why do working-class and lower-middle-class whites often vote against their apparent class interests, even as working-class and lower-income people of color don’t?

There’s another element, too. In the recent book The Wimp Factor, which is on the whole an excellent examination of the motivations behind male voting behavior, Stephen Ducat suggests that “anxious masculinity” prompts men to seek to reassert their domination through a macho politics of control and semi-authoritarian policy options.

Yet what Ducat overlooks is how race—particularly whiteness—undergird his theory. After all, men of color, though subjected to the same patriarchal messages and conditioning as white men, do not usually vote for right-wing candidates or policies. So why? Why do white men vote so differently from men of color?

In other words, flipping Thomas Frank’s question a bit, the issue is not “What’s the matter with Kansas,” but, rather, “What’s the matter with white people?”

I would suggest four principal reasons why whites vote so differently from people of color who are otherwise similar in terms of class, gender and religion—and, thus, why most whites are largely immune to the appeal of class-based politics.

The luxury of believing in meritocracy

To begin with, class-based appeals have always been difficult in the United States. This is largely because, unlike the European nations in which Marxism first gained traction, in the U.S. the notion of meritocracy has been a cornerstone of the nation’s ethos. No such pretense has existed in most places, least of all those that were so proud to have developed under feudal arrangements. But here, the myth of individual merit and mobility has been central to the construction of the nation’s political soul.

This myth of meritocracy is especially alluring to whites, whose experiences with upward mobility have been just sufficient to allow faith in the concept to be maintained over time. While truly poor whites may know better (and largely vote their class interests, as noted above), those who earn incomes around the median are likely doing well enough to believe that with just a little more effort on their part, they could climb to the next level on the class ladder. As such, they are likely to be skeptical of class-based appeals for their vote. After all, they may feel no animosity for those above them, and indeed expect that one day they will join them in the ranks of the affluent.

Self-interest and the value of whiteness

Perhaps most important, what much of the left overlooks is that self-interest is not just an economic or class concept.

A simple glance at the history of this country makes it all too clear that whites, in particular, have been willing to overlook their class interests for the sake of racial privilege. Working-class whites did this in the South when elites convinced them to fight for a slave system that undercut their own economic well-being; they did it again during the emergence of the labor movement when, fearing the racial solidarity in wages that unionism would bring, they fought to keep their unions all-white.

In other words, white supremacy has long offered whites an alternative identity, apart from their class status, around which to rally. As UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris puts it, whiteness is a form a property every bit as valuable to those who possess it as the material goods they might receive by voting for more progressive candidates. This is not false consciousness, in other words, but alternative consciousness: the prioritizing of non-fiscal interests by people who have been offered alternative benefits by a system of racial inequity.

So if whites—even those whose economic status is vulnerable—come to view progressive government policies or candidates as threats to their hegemonic status and control (whether through immigration, affirmative action, welfare and social service programs, or even a foreign policy that is insufficiently belligerent to non-white terrorists), it ought not surprise us that such folks might ignore their true class interests and vote instead for what they view as their other interests, including those that are in effect conceived in racial terms.

It’s not only race that provides an alternative identity to which whites can cleave: so too with gender, religion or sexual orientation.

Heterosexual male evangelicals of color have a hard time ignoring their economic interests, so clearly are these endangered by the right-wing politics of the ruling party. This is so even if they share some of the gender, religious and sexual anxieties of white men. But white male evangelicals enjoy enough mobility in most cases to allow them to ignore class and instead emphasize their status as men or straight Christians. After all, maleness, heterosexuality and Christianity are also forms of property in this society, as with whiteness. They provide benefits, in relative terms, and a form of personal and collective elevation above others—and as such are guarded jealously by those who fear that their status is being challenged in those realms of daily life.

While black men might logically view the greatest challenge to their patriarchal manhood as systemic—the inability, thanks to a racialized class system, to provide for their families—and thus vote in more progressive fashions, white men, whose ability to serve as providers tends to be more secure, have the luxury of viewing the biggest threats to their manhood in decidedly gonadal terms: threats from feminists, homosexuals and such.

So appeals to homophobia, or Ducat’s anxious masculinity, would be more likely to work with whites than people of color and could often trump class concerns—not because of false consciousness, but through the capacity of privilege to create alternative interests and forms of property.

As for religion, there is little doubt that white evangelical Christianity has always been fundamentally different from that practiced by people of color. That difference is the difference between the faith of the conqueror and that of the conquered. While black Christianity, for example, has long been a theology of liberation, redemption and deliverance, the Christianity of white Americans has almost always been—in its fundamentalist conceptions—a theology of dominion. So when that hegemonic Christianity suffers challenges (real or imagined), those accustomed to the unquestioned privileges of their scriptural interpretation, and their untrammeled ability to define the larger culture logically engage in backlash.

While evangelicals of color can and do recognize that “moral issues” include poverty, unemployment, racism and unjust wars abroad, that white evangelicals (at least those who are not poor) literally cannot conceptualize morality that way, as doing so would require that they interrogate their own role in immorality, their privileges and the degree to which those privileges come at the expense of those without them.

So whether the issues at play in an election are explicitly racial, or merely play to the gender, sexual and religious anxieties of whites whose privileges allow them to define their identities other than as workers in a class-stratified system, the effect is the same: Whites remain far more resistant to populist and class-based appeals for votes and support. Their electoral behavior is based less on values in the abstract, or moral values specifically, and more on the value they place upon maintaining their relative status as members of a privileged group.

The force of cynicism

Adding to white folks’ willingness to ignore their economic interests and instead prioritize their status as whites, or men, or Christians, or heterosexuals, is a deep cynicism regarding the ability to fundamentally change the economic system.

If the class system is indeed a powerful monolith in which the wealthy pretty much have their way with the rest of us, one ought not be surprised when some folks, despairing of their ability to really change such a behemoth, decide to gravitate to other forms of political mobilization than those offered by class consciousness. In fact, there’s a psychological logic to it that multiplies exponentially the more convinced one becomes that one is getting one’s ass kicked by the rich.

While the left has always assumed working-class folks would respond to rising class consciousness with rebellion, or at least by pushing for reform, there is in fact another option: that they can become so defeatist about the prospects for change that they could then seek refuge elsewhere. For some, such refuge can be provided, for some at least, by the politics of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation.

By cleaving to their racial, religious, gender and sexual identities, people who are white, male, Christian and/or straight can identify with an inspiring vision of hegemony and entitlement. After all, despite feeling “under siege” by gays, women, people of color and secular humanists, identifying their interests along these axes is nonetheless more empowering than identifying as workers.

Such people can clearly “remember” a time when straight white Christian men were not only dominant (which they still are) but exercised a kind of control that was largely unquestioned and unthreatened in the mainstream. But they cannot envision a time when workers like them were ever running the show, so even if they find economic populism appealing at an intellectual and affective level, they may become cynical about the prospects for change—for exercising power—in that realm. Frustrated, they will logically then turn to those arenas of daily life where they are likely to be more successful, where their strength is palpable, where their privileges—however vulnerable—are still very much intact.

Everybody loves a winner

In keeping with this last line of analysis, our nation’s cultural attachment to winners makes the efficacy of class-based political appeals questionable, to put it generously.

America, more so than anywhere else on earth, has nurtured a cultural preference for winners over losers, such that many of its residents seek nothing more than to identify with the winners, whoever they may be: a sports team, random billionaires like Donald Trump or Bill Gates, or the larger class of successful rich folks.

To ask workers to identify and act on their interests as workers is to ask them to identify, by definition, with the losers in the class game—and nothing in this culture is less appealing than to be labeled and seen as a loser. At least by identifying their interests and identity in non-class terms—as Christians, heterosexuals, whites and/or as men—such persons can nurture a sense of power, or superiority, in their status as winners, since these are all dominant groups to which they belong, instead of that relatively weak grouping of which they are also a part: workers.

While people of color can hardly ignore their marginal status, and while truly poor and lower-income whites too will typically identify their interests in economic terms, those whites in the middle class—whose economic status is precarious but not desperate—have the luxury of identifying with these other, more rewarding identities. Indeed, they have every reason to do so.

So what to do about white political pathology?

Given the various limitations placed on explicit class-based appeals aimed at middle- and working-class whites, progressives must then consider what they might do if they wish to gain actual political strength. Putting aside the obvious limitations of electoral power in any guise, there are at least some lessons to be gleaned that might help push a progressive politics forward.

First, the white left must come to realize that it has a white people problem, and that problem is directly related to white privilege. To the extent whites have advantages over people of color, it becomes possible and even likely that many whites will seek to maximize their relative advantage over others, rather than thinking of self-interest in explicitly class terms. As such, the left will have to confront white privilege directly: exposing it for what it is and how it operates, and demonstrating the harm that racial inequality does to those without such privileges, and to the larger society.

Next, progressives, and especially white progressives, must point out the destructive downsides to a system of inequality, racial privilege, gender privilege and religious hostility. We must articulate and organize around an analysis that focuses on the way in which such inequalities and hostilities make neighborhoods and communities less sustainable, increase the likelihood of terrorism and contribute to the very anxieties that so many Americans feel. After all, trying to maintain one’s edge over others—be it racial, religious, gendered or whatever else—takes an enormous amount of energy.

Third, we must develop a narrative of fairness that directly creates shame around racism, sexism, heterosexual supremacy and Christian supremacy. Most whites who cling to these forms of domination have never been challenged to think about their views and what those positions mean for those who are different from themselves. If we assume that most white people are decent and rational—which at some level the populist theorists assume by definition—then we must also assume they can be reached by appeals to fairness. By ignoring fairness and seeking only to appeal to self-interest, we leave in place the very kind of relative thinking that has long propelled whites to elevate race and now gender, religious and heterosexual interests to the pinnacle of their political ideology. Such appeals, of course, are unlikely to move most whites, but could move the small percentage necessary to alter election outcomes, and thus create the breathing room to effectively challenge both major electoral parties and the larger political-economic system.

Finally, we must bring to bear a vision of social change and economic transformation. It isn’t enough to argue that the tax cuts pushed by Republicans are only for the rich, or to claim that the health care plan of Democrats is somewhat better than that offered by Republicans. Unless voters are given a reason to believe that truly transformative change is possible—not merely differences at the margins of public policy—it will make sense for them to ignore class appeals and instead define their perceived interests in arenas where they feel a greater level of efficacy and control.

Thus, the left will have to seriously revisit and extend analyses about what the economy and polity might look like, and how the system to which we have grown accustomed might change: how work might be organized differently, how communities might be reconceptualized, and how working people might be able to exercise greater power and control over their lives. While we can’t expect the Democratic Party to do much or even any of this, there is no reason why progressive movement activists can’t focus on such future visions, trading what we’re against in favor of the world we’re for.

Whatever the case, we should acknowledge the limitations of class politics, whether conceived in Marxist or Democratic Party terms. In this country, white folks are a political breed unto themselves; until progressives come to understand the inner workings of that species’ mental structures, we’ll be unlikely to reverse the rising tide of reactionary sentiment among so many of their kind.

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