patrick.net

Much of that change had nothing to do with race relations or identity politics, but with the alienation of middle-class and working-class whites from the coastal elites. I have written about that alienation at length. But if identity politics did not start the change, it had become part of it. Compare the two electoral maps above with the one below. It is also based on counties. Red counties are ones in which at least 50 percent of the population is white. The darker the red, the higher the percentage. Blue counties are ones in which whites are not a majority. The darker the blue, the higher the percentage of minorities. ...

Perhaps the deepening polarization would have continued just because of the alienation between elites on the coasts and the people who live between them. But it is also plausible that the alienation between blacks and whites played a role. Purely on grounds of expediency, the rhetoric about white privilege and systemic racism coming from black opinion leaders has always seemed borderline suicidal. Blacks, constituting 13 percent of the population, are telling whites, 60 percent of the population, that they are racist, bad people, the cause of blacks’ problems, and they had better change their ways or else. Right or wrong, that rhetoric has been guaranteed to produce backlash by some portion of the 60 percent against the 13 percent. So far, this effect has been masked because the strategy has worked so well with white elites. Ordinarily, you can’t insult people into agreeing with you, but white guilt is a real thing. In the summer of 2020, many white college students and young adults agreed that they had sinned, even though they hadn’t realized it until now, and joined in Black Lives Matter marches. The New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, PBS, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and MSNBC gave sympathetic coverage to the protests and, to varying degrees, downplayed the riots and looting.

Meanwhile, many middle-class and working-class whites have not been insulted into agreement. They’re just insulted, and to their minds unfairly insulted. I’m not talking about white nationalists and white supremacists — their numbers are relatively small. My concern is the extremely large majority of middle-class and working-class whites who don’t think of themselves as racists and have not behaved as racists.

Tens of millions of these people live in towns that have no black residents or just a few, and racial issues haven’t impinged on their lives. They don’t understand why they are being accused of racism. Still other tens of millions live in large cities where racial problems have been real, but they see themselves as having treated black and Latino neighbors and coworkers with friendship and respect. They believe that everyone has a God-given right to be treated equally. Now all of them are being told that they are privileged and racist, and they are asking on what grounds. They are living ordinary lives, with average incomes, working hard to make ends meet. They can’t see what ‘white privilege’ they have ever enjoyed. Some are fed up and ready to push back.

How widespread might the backlash be? It is one of those topics that the elite media has been unable to investigate more than superficially. But it seems beyond dispute that a growing number of whites are disposed to adopt identity politics — to become a racial interest group in the same way that blacks and Latinos are racial interest groups.

The question asks itself: if a minority consisting of 13 percent of the population can generate as much political energy and solidarity as America’s blacks have, what happens when a large proportion of the 60 percent of the population that is white begins to use the same playbook?