What’s the matter with white people? One of the burdens of blackness, W. E. B. Du. Bois famously wrote, was facing down an omnipresent question from the wider society: “How does it feel to be a problem?” I’ve been wondering lately if white people might soon understand what he meant.
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- What’s the matter with white people? Americans that would run as a voucher.
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Both the right and left suddenly have a lot of complaints about white people, particularly the so- called white working class. Charles Murray, the man who in the 1. But white rich people are a problem, too: Murray’s book “Coming Apart: The State of White American 1. Today it’s hard to ignore the racial resentment that feeds the hysterical anti- Obama movement – the sickening email about the president’s mother sent by a federal judge is just the latest example. Democratic pollsters and strategists have been wringing their hands over losing the white working class to the GOP since the rise of “Reagan Democrats,” but it’s now remarkable the extent to which the Republican Party has become a white party. Where that was an advantage back in Buchanan’s day, though, it’s an eroding base in the 2.
The programs give recipients very bad incentives. Against all that, the 'hard-core' argument #12.
About 5. 2 percent of white voters call themselves Republicans, according to the Pew Research Center, as opposed to 8 percent of blacks and 2. Latinos. In a provocative New York magazine piece, Jonathan Chait says white voters are all that stands between the Republican Party and “demographic extinction.” But since white America itself will soon be demographically extinct, as the dominant racial group anyway, Chait sees the GOP doubling down on its 4. Custer’s. It’s true: white Americans will technically be a minority by mid- century — although questions about how we count “white people” versus “people of color” (some mixed- race people as well as Latinos think of themselves as “white”) — let us crunch these numbers in different ways. Sometime in the 2. There are signs that some white people, at least, aren’t taking it all that well. Should Democrats pop the champagne corks and celebrate the permanent political realignment? Should supporters of racial justice cheer on the new demographic reality?
It’s a little early, on both counts. In 2. 00. 8, James Carville jumped the gun with his triumphal book “Forty More Years.” In 2. GOP took back the House and narrowed the Democrats’ lead dangerously in the Senate, when the proportion of white and senior voters rose and the share of young and minority voters declined. But even if time seems to be on our side, there are risks involved in Democrats talking about a counter- racial strategy. Some campaign strategists have suggested that the president worry less about the stubborn white working class in 2.
African Americans and Latinos. The right, in turn, has picked up on such musings and exaggerated them, all to keep that white- hot white resentment burning. In late 2. 01. 1, a Wall Street Journal columnist announced, “Obama Will Abandon The Working Class,” but of course he only talked about working class whites. It was a misleading headline on a story about the campaign’s focus on Latino votes in the Southwest, combined with an outside demographer’s observations about the president’s ongoing difficulties with working class whites. Just Wednesday, before he began the filthy rant about Sandra Fluke that ought to get him mothballed, Rush Limbaugh railed that Obama “Casts Aside White, Working- Class Families While Setting Up .
Of course it’s Limbaugh and his hard- core listeners who want a race war; the rest of us, of every race, mainly just want to get along. With all this hand- wringing about white people, what should the president’s strategy be in 2. I think it should be what it’s become since the summer: a full- throated commitment to building an economy that works for everyone, backed by a government that’s run for everyone, not just for the 1 percent. The passionate President Obama who told the United Auto Workers on Tuesday that he backed the Big Three rescue plan because “I believed in you!” can win re- election – and if he can’t win back a majority of the white working class from the GOP (and he probably can’t), he can do as well as he did in 2. The emerging multiracial Obama coalition has the potential to transform the way we all think about race and politics as we invent the next — but only if we can all forgo petty racial score- setting and 2. And only if more white people wake up to what they’ve let the Republican Party do to the country in the last 4.
A New York Times analysis found that Obama won 4. Bill Clinton’s 4. He kept John Mc. Cain’s edge with that group to 6 points, when George W. Bush won them by 3.
John Kerry four years earlier. And in some swing states, like Ohio, the “Obama coalition” ultimately included the white working class. Although Hillary Clinton trounced him with those voters in the March 2. November the president’s fired- up populist pitch plus the banking collapse pulled white voters making under $5. Yes, many of those voters raced back into the Republican column in 2. GOP ran up a 3. 0- point edge in midterm congressional races, and for much of 2.
Democrats talked darkly about a strategy to keep the White House without winning Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, key swing states he took in 2. But I’m not sure why we’d conclude that those voters’ problem was mainly racial, or that they had run back to the GOP for good. Had they shaken off their racism in 2. What if their reaction derived from frustration with Democratic leaders who hadn’t pursued an economic turnaround agenda aggressively enough, at a time when unemployment stood at more than 1. There are also signs that some of those white voters might have developed buyers’ remorse a few months after the 2. A wave of new GOP governors made unexpectedly aggressive moves against labor – and in Wisconsin and Ohio, working class voters fought back. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and Ohio’s John Kasich made public workers the new public enemy, and demonized them as slackers and moochers living off the government, kind of like they were the new “welfare queens.” In November 2.
Ohio repealed GOP governor John Kasich’s bill that stripped public sector unions of their collective bargaining rights, and Wisconsin voters began a drive to recall Scott Walker. In Maine, which had elected a Tea Party governor in 2. Republican- sponsored law that had abolished the state’s traditional same- day registration practice. The ten states that allowed citizens to register and vote at the same time, a practice that dramatically increases voter turnout, just happened to be the nation’s most homogeneous—that is, the whitest—from Idaho to Wyoming to Maine. Yet once Republicans realized that even in the whitest states, same- day voter laws empower citizens who are more likely to vote against them—students, young people, the lower- income of every race, and yes, the nonwhite—they’ve fought these voter laws ruthlessly.
Thus the radical GOP is now rolling back rights white people have long taken for granted – and in Maine, at least, they fought back. Maybe they’ll do so around the country in the next election. In the 2. 01. 2 GOP presidential campaign, I’ve been amazed by the extent to which the leading candidates are comfortable demonizing “dependency,” which includes the now 4. Americans now on food stamps as well as the 7.
This is the new GOP narrative: that Obama is extending the welfare state, just as the right- wing has always feared — but they’re now calling certain groups of whites the new moochers. After Limbaugh’s disgusting attack on Sandra Fluke, conservatives began a new, more genteel crusade against her, calling her a “welfare queen” who wanted the government to pay for her birth control. When Rick Santorum got into hot water for seeming to say he didn’t want to make “black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money,” he was able to argue – even if not entirely believably – that he wasn’t just talking about black people (or “blah” people): “I’ve been pretty clear about my concern for dependency in this country and concern for people not being more dependent on our government, whatever their race or ethnicity is.” And that’s true. Santorum blames all struggling Americans for giving up on the father- headed, nuclear family that makes this country strong.
And in the last GOP debate, Santorum quoted Charles Murray on the scourge of “the increasing number of children being born out of wedlock in America,” without mentioning that Murray was attacking white people. But he’s not the only Republican who talks that way. South Carolina Tea Party Sen. Jim De. Mint also warns about the growing spread of “dependency” throughout the populace. Dependent voters will naturally elect even big- government progressives who will continue to smother economic growth and spend America deeper into debt.” Chat quotes De.
Mint warning ominously: “The 2. Republicans.” Paul Ryan, he of the “Ryan Plan” to abolish Medicare, divides the electorate into “makers” and “takers.”This is coded language meant to whip the GOP base into a frenzy of fear and resentment. Because for the last 4.
Democrats sided with in the 1. African American. Yet today, many white folks who are voting Republican don’t seem to know one important fact: they are, in fact, the “takers.”We joke about white Tea Party supporters demanding to keep the government out of their Medicare. We know that much of the GOP’s aging white base relies on Social Security. But the contradiction runs even deeper than that: Dartmouth political scientist Dean Lacy found the more a county receives in federal government payments, the more likely it is to vote Republican.