All true (as I have reason to know from my own family's struggles and losses). Yet there is an irony here. For most of my life, it's been precisely the white working class from whom one heard most that America is the land of opportunity, where anyone with gumption can get ahead. The same speakers tended to dismiss the chronic complaints …
All true (as I have reason to know from my own family's struggles and losses). Yet there is an irony here. For most of my life, it's been precisely the white working class from whom one heard most that America is the land of opportunity, where anyone with gumption can get ahead. The same speakers tended to dismiss the chronic complaints of black Americans, who, they said, just didn't know how to make something of themselves (i.e., they are lazy). I certainly heard those sentiments often in the 1970s and 1980s; that one doesn't hear them now doesn't mean they have gone away. The so-called dog-whistles of people like Trump testify that such resentment still exists.
White despair is not solely economic. In 1960, almost 89% of the American population was white. In 2020, only 61% was. By midcentury at latest, people who identify as white will be a minority. Awareness of this decline, and realization that it is continuing, is behind both the ressentiment of disfavored whites and the increased assertiveness of minorities, especially blacks. The ground continues to shift under all of us (it's called "history," or maybe just "time"), and it affects our emotional state far more than we realize. The "despair" isn't just about being limited to low paying jobs; even more, it's about losing the old faith that this is a white man's country. While those words have been avoided for decades now, that is the psychological reality. Within recent, memory, whites could rest easy that most political power resided in them. Less so now, and much less so in the future.
The only way out is to return to the "old" idea (it goes back to the 1960s) of a multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural nation. That vision alone holds hope for the future, but of course it won't work if there are major holdouts, such as despairing whites or resentful blacks or culturally ghettoized Latinx. We either go all the way, or our internal divisions will simply widen, furnishing ever more abundant potential for demagogues.
Please note that I said "idea." The United States has always been an idea country, in the sense that what formed us was not blood or religion or even history, but a civic religion--the Constitution, our respect for the rule of law, our ideal of equality before the law, and the value we place on freedom to be who we wish to be--what the Supreme Court (long ago, when it was still a mostly nonpolitical entity) called "our system of ordered liberty." Those ideas must still form the base of any racial-cultural rapprochement, but the difficulty will be to strenuously discuss and debate the racial, ethnic and cultural strands we have and how to weave them into a new version of the United States of America. As in Lincoln's time, we must either create something new or else perish from the earth.
All true (as I have reason to know from my own family's struggles and losses). Yet there is an irony here. For most of my life, it's been precisely the white working class from whom one heard most that America is the land of opportunity, where anyone with gumption can get ahead. The same speakers tended to dismiss the chronic complaints of black Americans, who, they said, just didn't know how to make something of themselves (i.e., they are lazy). I certainly heard those sentiments often in the 1970s and 1980s; that one doesn't hear them now doesn't mean they have gone away. The so-called dog-whistles of people like Trump testify that such resentment still exists.
White despair is not solely economic. In 1960, almost 89% of the American population was white. In 2020, only 61% was. By midcentury at latest, people who identify as white will be a minority. Awareness of this decline, and realization that it is continuing, is behind both the ressentiment of disfavored whites and the increased assertiveness of minorities, especially blacks. The ground continues to shift under all of us (it's called "history," or maybe just "time"), and it affects our emotional state far more than we realize. The "despair" isn't just about being limited to low paying jobs; even more, it's about losing the old faith that this is a white man's country. While those words have been avoided for decades now, that is the psychological reality. Within recent, memory, whites could rest easy that most political power resided in them. Less so now, and much less so in the future.
The only way out is to return to the "old" idea (it goes back to the 1960s) of a multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural nation. That vision alone holds hope for the future, but of course it won't work if there are major holdouts, such as despairing whites or resentful blacks or culturally ghettoized Latinx. We either go all the way, or our internal divisions will simply widen, furnishing ever more abundant potential for demagogues.
Please note that I said "idea." The United States has always been an idea country, in the sense that what formed us was not blood or religion or even history, but a civic religion--the Constitution, our respect for the rule of law, our ideal of equality before the law, and the value we place on freedom to be who we wish to be--what the Supreme Court (long ago, when it was still a mostly nonpolitical entity) called "our system of ordered liberty." Those ideas must still form the base of any racial-cultural rapprochement, but the difficulty will be to strenuously discuss and debate the racial, ethnic and cultural strands we have and how to weave them into a new version of the United States of America. As in Lincoln's time, we must either create something new or else perish from the earth.