Heather McGhee (“The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together”) publishes an excerpt in the New York Times that says a lot in a few words about grievance-driven reactionaries attempting to shred the safety net and hold onto an America defined by … well, by them:
On a call with a group of all-white economist colleagues, we discussed how to advise leaders in Washington against this disastrous retrenchment. I cleared my throat and asked: “So where should we make the point that all these programs were created without concern for their cost when the goal was to build a white middle class, and they paid for themselves in economic growth? Now these guys are trying to fundamentally renege on the deal for a future middle class that would be majority people of color?”
Nobody answered. I checked to see if I was muted.
Finally, one of the economists breached the awkward silence. “Well, sure, Heather. We know that — and you know that — but let’s not lead with our chin here,” he said. “We are trying to be persuasive.”
McGhee covered some of this ground in a recent interview with Anand Giridharadas. The parable of the pool is one reason we can’t have nice things in America anymore. It is no accident that support for economic guarantees began to slip the moment the country in the 1960s began including Black people in them. “It’s also no accident that, to this day, no Democratic presidential candidate has won the white vote since the Democrat Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts,” she writes:
Racial integration portended the end of America’s high-tax, high-investment growth strategy: Tax revenue hit its peak as a percentage of the economy in 1965. Now, America’s per capita government spending is near the bottom among industrialized countries. Our roads, bridges and water systems get a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Unlike our peers, we don’t have high-speed rail, universal broadband, mandatory paid family leave or universal child care.
And while growing corporate power and money in politics have certainly played a role, it’s now clear that racial resentment is the key uncredited actor in our economic backslide. White people who exhibit low racial resentment against Black people are 60 percentage points more likely to support increased government spending than are those with high racial resentment. At the base of this resentment is a zero-sum story: the default framework for conservative arguments, rife with references to “makers and takers,” “taxpayers and freeloaders.”
Read: white conservatives and all Others; Us vs. Them; if They get more, I get less.
Soon after integration finally came to South Carolina schools in 1970, some guy named “Red” formed a county “property owners’ association” where I lived. Its primary mission seemed to be preventing tax increases for funding local schools under the rubric of accountability and thrift. That his children faced a sadder future in that then-dying textile town seemed not to register. (Things got better anyway when foreign companies brought in jobs, demanded better, and got better.)
Did white people win in pushing back against Black equality? No, says McGhee. Many lost economic opportunity and social mobility, seeming not to care so long as they saw themselves higher in the social pecking order.
The task ahead, then, is to unwind this idea of a fixed quantity of prosperity and replace it with what I’ve come to call Solidarity Dividends: gains available to everyone when they unite across racial lines, in the form of higher wages, cleaner air and better-funded schools.
Or we could just burn it to the ground to keep Them from having shares in the same opportunity. A mob of insurrectionists who wanted things to be “great again” tried that just last month. Unwinding that idea will take some doing.