Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute demonstrates convincingly that a lot of people have been overcomplicating the political moment. The reason for the sharp polarization of American politics is unitary and pretty damn simple. (This is a substack entry and it begins with a couple of notes in passing before he gets to the main entry, so don't get confused when you click the link. But do click it.) Here's one picture that's worth a thousand words:
He goes on to show that racial attitudes are more powerfully predictive of voting for Republicans, including Ronald T. Dump, than abortion, or gay rights, and a lot more than economic issues which actually don't motivate conservative voters at all. As he puts it:
In recent years, public opinion surveys have been clearly telling us that our two political parties are polarizing not over competing economic visions but over disparate visions of American identity. Today, the parties are more divided over the changing demographics of the country, and the place of the former white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethnoreligious majority in it, than over economic policy.
And he concludes:
If we really want to heal the soul of the nation and achieve our country, we can’t continue to paper over racial injustice with economic policy. "It’s the culture, stupid”—or less euphemistically, “It’s the white supremacy, stupid”—must be the new mantra of political analysts today.
And so we return to the previous post. What Bonhoeffer was labeling stupidity was antisemitism and support for Nazism. So what do you think I intended by referring to stupidity in 21st Century America?
2 comments:
My mother, Ruth Gold Cohen, was one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known. (And I have known some truly brilliant and remarkable people.)
Decades ago, she said to me, “The biggest problem facing the country is racism.“
It’s the zillion-ton elephant sitting on our collective chest, destroying us.
The problem here is one of chickens and eggs: i.e. is the policy vacuum due to racism or is the racism a result of our policy vacuum. I think you know where I stand on this.
As I have said before, anthropologists observe that, in times of existential scarcity people cling hardest to tribal mores and totems. More, it is commonly observed that such scarcity breeds increasingly nasty fights over resource distribution. Further, it is natural (perhaps instinctual) to search for a culprit and the rich have been playing an excellent game of "let's you and him fight." Lastly, I would note that the greatest gains in civil rights were made in an atmosphere of economic expansion and high expectations where it was much easier to divide the pie between more people.
For quite some time neither party has offered, much less delivered, substantively different economic visions. In such a vacuum, and confronted by progressive immiseration, the polity can only respond to the trumpets of culture war.
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