My politically conservative father has not voted for a Democrat since Jimmy Carter. This is a message that appeals to him. CEO pay & decreasing living standards in his area (very white, very rural): two things he talks about, constantly.
If the message is racialized, it becomes less salient. To his credit, he is fair-minded enough to acknowledge our history of racial inequity and how it factors into economic outcomes. Still, these conversations are meaningless for his community unless they are tied to economics, because they only have poor people that are white. Southwest Virginia not likely to go progressive any time soon, but I think this should be the mantle of the oft-malpracticed Democratic strategy to win in rural communities.
Some of your points relate to the narrow group of billionaires, while the top quarter probably includes most of your white audience. The slippage in who is "rich" is a big problem in framing solutions about class. I have a feeling the necessary solutions involve redistribution from the top quarter, but in the comments you are telling people they can ignore that point if they don't like it!
I agree with the political argument that it’s better for progressive coalitions to focus on economic redistribution and maybe public policy more broadly in a race neutral way. I also agree that better enforcement of laws that currently exist can go a long way in ameliorating discrimination.
That said, I don’t think there’s enough acknowledgement of how much US political economy is racialized, and how challenging it is to execute your strategy.
For example, Obama tried to follow this logic pretty closely, and we were barely were able to get Obamacare passed and maintained (to this day). And the policy impact of Obamacare is less likely to reach Blacker states like Alabama vs. whiter states like Massachusetts.
And this isn’t to say that Obamacare wasn’t the best that we could do. It’s suggesting that those design choices reflect a fairly racialized political economy even when you’re trying to do the opposite, which has the intended effects.
So the politics that we’re seeing is an effort to change the country’s political economy by not pretending that race isn’t a considerable animating factor for the behavior of political actors, but calling it out, and rejecting it as the only way to get out of our toxic political dynamics. It’s just not sustainable for the people living through it.
To be a bit clearer, what’s missing from this argument that makes it much weaker is that if you do this analysis against a whole range of socioeconomic outcomes around health, education, criminal justice, civic engagement, social capital, etc. there are huge racial gaps across class there as well. And living under those conditions is disempowering and miserable.
For example, economic mobility for middle class black boys is lower than for poor white boys! Rich black boys are more likely to end up in jail than poor white boys! That’s not a class problem. And the experience of living in that hierarchy isn’t properly reflected in the outcomes that we’re focused on.
An important question to consider, is how do you build a politics that doesn’t acknowledge that? Barack is right! Defund the police is a terrible slogan - but I am not sure “Reform the police” would have created better politics at the margins. It would be demagogued in the same way, and not forced a reckoning with the issues we need to have.
I am halfway convinced that your approach would work, but can we go to the places in the country that are closer to this approach vs. not and are their outcomes any better or any less racialized?
Most people of color don’t want to have every argument and analysis on the basis of race, and many are aware that wealthy POC can learn to live comfortably in an unsustainable class hierarchy. They also know the impact of race permeates everything and it has to be extricated in parallel with executing a more class based politics and policy.
This post triggered some thoughts about how potentially malicious corporate wokeness can be. Not to get too tin foil, but an especially cynical corporate PR department could be promoting cultural wokeness to both win kudos from cultural elites while spiking the football on risking real change (especially economic change) because they know tying woke goals to liberal economics poisons both politically. Have their cake and eat it too!
I’m sorry, but some of this conflates two basic facts:
1. The US has massive wealth inequality with an increasing concentration of wealth by the super rich.
2. There has been a persistent racial gap in median household wealth for decades. As of 2016, the median net worth of white households was about ten (10) times that of the median black household. [1]
10x is enormous! This demonstrates that there is a much broader set of white households that have a moderate amount of wealth. The racial wealth gap is persistent across educational levels, across age groups, and across income quintiles! [1][2]
There is a long history - even just looking in the 20th century - of the US government providing wealth to white families and excluding Black families: the GI Bill, the New Deal largely exempting agricultural and domestic workers, promoting nationwide segregation through restrictive covenants and redlining for federally backed mortgages, etc.
Yes, I agree that suburban districts have continued to remain segregated largely through single-family zoning and land-use restrictions, and true integration would include more multi-family housing.
So ever since I read about this paper funded by Nick Hanauer I have just been gobsmacked by how much concentration of wealth at the top has been harmful to everyone else and caused most of the resentment and anxiety fueling a ton of our current social and political ills: https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html If productivity growth had been shared more equitably from the mid 1970s to now all boats would be higher (they find median income would be doubled!) -- and hopefully we could focus more on eradicating racial and gender and other sources of inequality and discrimination. And the rich would still be plenty rich -- just not insanely so. I am super pro capitalism because markets do a good job of improving our material standard of living and pushing innovation, but we need to redistribute our GDP more equitably or we will never shake off all the conspiratorial crazy -- because there actually is a very small elite that controls an unhealthy amount of wealth.
Many (including me) agree that most people aren't rich. But what you don't address is that the history of universalistic programs is rivened by white racism. The history of social security is well known, But even the most recent attempt to benefit everyone--the Affordable Care Act--was opposed by white people everywhere, especially at first. It required a supermajority in the Senate and a Black president to be enacted--and even so Tea Partyists used its passage to elect an ACA opponent in MA. In short, what do you propose to do about white people who oppose universal programs mainly because they think universal programs benefit non-white people? Asking for me.
Unless I've totally misread the take here, what this (very good and informative, by the way) post represents is the intersections of Matt Yglesias and Bernie Sanders.
I think taking off the top 25% is statistically silly. If a baseball batter is one for four on average, he's mediocre. Make him one for three, and he's one of the best hitters in the game.
CSB: I used to be a union organizer. One of the (many) things that we had to fight was "bosses"/conservatives driving a racial wedge between people who were fighting the same fight. And now " liberals" do it; if you even attempt to explain why this is a bad idea, they will call you racist.
Like many things that can seem incidental or coincidental, this isn't. The kind of people who fund the CAP (for instance) would much rather hire three black women and have everyone tell them how awesome they are, than give 300 people a raise (including *30* and genuinely make a
All of the "just lop off the richest quarter of white people" analysis seems very suspect to me. Excluding rich whites and not excluding rich Blacks would be expected to make a wealth gap disappear, right?
What happens if you re-run all this analysis after also lopping off the richest quarter of Blacks. I suspect that you'll find a racial wealth gap again.
I'm not going to look this next bit up to verify it (poor form on my part, but it's very early in the day), but I remember reading once that the median net worth of Black families in Boston was effectively zero. The median wealth of white Boston families is presumably not zero.
Idk man. I think sometimes people try and reduce everything to class because "bring in the tide to lift all boats" is an easier sell than "bring in the tide but also plug the holes that people sawed into the hulls of 12% of all boats".
I'm always glad to read what you've written though, especially when we disagree.
I think some would argue that you are sort of side stepping the institutional racism argument. That argument would suggest there is an extra barrier on top of class that will still make it difficult for some people to rise economically even if you try to adjust some of the prosperity metrics through technocratic innovation. Do you have an opinion on how ingrained racism could be overcome directly rather than circumvented?
Good piece. I think you can make the same point about university admissions. I don't get why there are so many battles over racial diversity in college admissions. To me it makes more sense for colleges to simply allot more spots to lower income families and that should increase diversity along with it. Unless they don't really care about assisting lower income kids and would be happier taking in upper class minorities.
I think this ties into another, related question, one which maybe Matt would like to ponder in another post: why has the US -- pretty much alone among Western nations -- never had a strong, let alone successful, socialist movement?
Many have attributed it to an ingrained suspicion on strong governments. Probably true, but also true is that most Western nations have historically been fairly uniform ethnically, racially and mostly religiously; their major dividing lines have been on class lines. In the US, class never has been the major activating feature of group conflict, whereas racial and ethnic divisions have been. Thus the default tendency in the US -- both on the left and the right -- is to see things divided on racial and not class lines.
If that's deeply embedded in our culture, I suspect class-based policy initiatives may have trouble succeeding.
My politically conservative father has not voted for a Democrat since Jimmy Carter. This is a message that appeals to him. CEO pay & decreasing living standards in his area (very white, very rural): two things he talks about, constantly.
If the message is racialized, it becomes less salient. To his credit, he is fair-minded enough to acknowledge our history of racial inequity and how it factors into economic outcomes. Still, these conversations are meaningless for his community unless they are tied to economics, because they only have poor people that are white. Southwest Virginia not likely to go progressive any time soon, but I think this should be the mantle of the oft-malpracticed Democratic strategy to win in rural communities.
Some of your points relate to the narrow group of billionaires, while the top quarter probably includes most of your white audience. The slippage in who is "rich" is a big problem in framing solutions about class. I have a feeling the necessary solutions involve redistribution from the top quarter, but in the comments you are telling people they can ignore that point if they don't like it!
I agree with the political argument that it’s better for progressive coalitions to focus on economic redistribution and maybe public policy more broadly in a race neutral way. I also agree that better enforcement of laws that currently exist can go a long way in ameliorating discrimination.
That said, I don’t think there’s enough acknowledgement of how much US political economy is racialized, and how challenging it is to execute your strategy.
For example, Obama tried to follow this logic pretty closely, and we were barely were able to get Obamacare passed and maintained (to this day). And the policy impact of Obamacare is less likely to reach Blacker states like Alabama vs. whiter states like Massachusetts.
And this isn’t to say that Obamacare wasn’t the best that we could do. It’s suggesting that those design choices reflect a fairly racialized political economy even when you’re trying to do the opposite, which has the intended effects.
So the politics that we’re seeing is an effort to change the country’s political economy by not pretending that race isn’t a considerable animating factor for the behavior of political actors, but calling it out, and rejecting it as the only way to get out of our toxic political dynamics. It’s just not sustainable for the people living through it.
To be a bit clearer, what’s missing from this argument that makes it much weaker is that if you do this analysis against a whole range of socioeconomic outcomes around health, education, criminal justice, civic engagement, social capital, etc. there are huge racial gaps across class there as well. And living under those conditions is disempowering and miserable.
For example, economic mobility for middle class black boys is lower than for poor white boys! Rich black boys are more likely to end up in jail than poor white boys! That’s not a class problem. And the experience of living in that hierarchy isn’t properly reflected in the outcomes that we’re focused on.
An important question to consider, is how do you build a politics that doesn’t acknowledge that? Barack is right! Defund the police is a terrible slogan - but I am not sure “Reform the police” would have created better politics at the margins. It would be demagogued in the same way, and not forced a reckoning with the issues we need to have.
I am halfway convinced that your approach would work, but can we go to the places in the country that are closer to this approach vs. not and are their outcomes any better or any less racialized?
Most people of color don’t want to have every argument and analysis on the basis of race, and many are aware that wealthy POC can learn to live comfortably in an unsustainable class hierarchy. They also know the impact of race permeates everything and it has to be extricated in parallel with executing a more class based politics and policy.
This post triggered some thoughts about how potentially malicious corporate wokeness can be. Not to get too tin foil, but an especially cynical corporate PR department could be promoting cultural wokeness to both win kudos from cultural elites while spiking the football on risking real change (especially economic change) because they know tying woke goals to liberal economics poisons both politically. Have their cake and eat it too!
I’m sorry, but some of this conflates two basic facts:
1. The US has massive wealth inequality with an increasing concentration of wealth by the super rich.
2. There has been a persistent racial gap in median household wealth for decades. As of 2016, the median net worth of white households was about ten (10) times that of the median black household. [1]
10x is enormous! This demonstrates that there is a much broader set of white households that have a moderate amount of wealth. The racial wealth gap is persistent across educational levels, across age groups, and across income quintiles! [1][2]
There is a long history - even just looking in the 20th century - of the US government providing wealth to white families and excluding Black families: the GI Bill, the New Deal largely exempting agricultural and domestic workers, promoting nationwide segregation through restrictive covenants and redlining for federally backed mortgages, etc.
Yes, I agree that suburban districts have continued to remain segregated largely through single-family zoning and land-use restrictions, and true integration would include more multi-family housing.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap/amp/
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/90461708/why-wealth-equality-remains-out-of-reach-for-black-americans
Using mean (average) is problematic for obvious reasons, but rather than just ignoring the top 25% of white population, why not use median instead?
As the statistics joke goes, whenever Bill Gates walks into a bar, everyone there on average becomes a billionaire.
So ever since I read about this paper funded by Nick Hanauer I have just been gobsmacked by how much concentration of wealth at the top has been harmful to everyone else and caused most of the resentment and anxiety fueling a ton of our current social and political ills: https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html If productivity growth had been shared more equitably from the mid 1970s to now all boats would be higher (they find median income would be doubled!) -- and hopefully we could focus more on eradicating racial and gender and other sources of inequality and discrimination. And the rich would still be plenty rich -- just not insanely so. I am super pro capitalism because markets do a good job of improving our material standard of living and pushing innovation, but we need to redistribute our GDP more equitably or we will never shake off all the conspiratorial crazy -- because there actually is a very small elite that controls an unhealthy amount of wealth.
Many (including me) agree that most people aren't rich. But what you don't address is that the history of universalistic programs is rivened by white racism. The history of social security is well known, But even the most recent attempt to benefit everyone--the Affordable Care Act--was opposed by white people everywhere, especially at first. It required a supermajority in the Senate and a Black president to be enacted--and even so Tea Partyists used its passage to elect an ACA opponent in MA. In short, what do you propose to do about white people who oppose universal programs mainly because they think universal programs benefit non-white people? Asking for me.
Unless I've totally misread the take here, what this (very good and informative, by the way) post represents is the intersections of Matt Yglesias and Bernie Sanders.
I think taking off the top 25% is statistically silly. If a baseball batter is one for four on average, he's mediocre. Make him one for three, and he's one of the best hitters in the game.
And this is why you Matt had to leave Vox
CSB: I used to be a union organizer. One of the (many) things that we had to fight was "bosses"/conservatives driving a racial wedge between people who were fighting the same fight. And now " liberals" do it; if you even attempt to explain why this is a bad idea, they will call you racist.
Like many things that can seem incidental or coincidental, this isn't. The kind of people who fund the CAP (for instance) would much rather hire three black women and have everyone tell them how awesome they are, than give 300 people a raise (including *30* and genuinely make a
Definitely an interesting read.
All of the "just lop off the richest quarter of white people" analysis seems very suspect to me. Excluding rich whites and not excluding rich Blacks would be expected to make a wealth gap disappear, right?
What happens if you re-run all this analysis after also lopping off the richest quarter of Blacks. I suspect that you'll find a racial wealth gap again.
I'm not going to look this next bit up to verify it (poor form on my part, but it's very early in the day), but I remember reading once that the median net worth of Black families in Boston was effectively zero. The median wealth of white Boston families is presumably not zero.
Idk man. I think sometimes people try and reduce everything to class because "bring in the tide to lift all boats" is an easier sell than "bring in the tide but also plug the holes that people sawed into the hulls of 12% of all boats".
I'm always glad to read what you've written though, especially when we disagree.
I think some would argue that you are sort of side stepping the institutional racism argument. That argument would suggest there is an extra barrier on top of class that will still make it difficult for some people to rise economically even if you try to adjust some of the prosperity metrics through technocratic innovation. Do you have an opinion on how ingrained racism could be overcome directly rather than circumvented?
Good piece. I think you can make the same point about university admissions. I don't get why there are so many battles over racial diversity in college admissions. To me it makes more sense for colleges to simply allot more spots to lower income families and that should increase diversity along with it. Unless they don't really care about assisting lower income kids and would be happier taking in upper class minorities.
I think this ties into another, related question, one which maybe Matt would like to ponder in another post: why has the US -- pretty much alone among Western nations -- never had a strong, let alone successful, socialist movement?
Many have attributed it to an ingrained suspicion on strong governments. Probably true, but also true is that most Western nations have historically been fairly uniform ethnically, racially and mostly religiously; their major dividing lines have been on class lines. In the US, class never has been the major activating feature of group conflict, whereas racial and ethnic divisions have been. Thus the default tendency in the US -- both on the left and the right -- is to see things divided on racial and not class lines.
If that's deeply embedded in our culture, I suspect class-based policy initiatives may have trouble succeeding.