[Bret L]

Anger in White America — Again

Kevin MacDonald

August 24, 2009

"The health care debate continues to rivet the country. By most accounts, the sheer emotional intensity of the protests has forced Democrats to scale back their plans for nationalized health care. And who are these angry protesters? The vast majority of these angry citizens are White people — a topic I wrote about recently, but before the health care debate assumed center stage.

The health care debate seems to have ratcheted things up a notch. As
an NPR commentary of August 13 noted,

If you've been anywhere near a TV in the past week, you have seen
images of irate voters berating their elected representatives. And if
so, you cannot have missed the strong representation of vociferous
Caucasian males of a certain age. Theirs are not the only voices
raised, but they are surely the loudest and most numerous.

A Democrat strategist commented,

the vocally disaffected represent a very real phenomenon that has been
rising around the country since before Obama's election. It is growing
in the face of a damaged economy, a series of bank and Wall Street
bailouts, and big-dollar government programs to stimulate jobs and
stave off foreclosures.

I've never seen as angry an electorate as this one. …. They're as
scared as I've ever seen them, and that manifests into anger.

There is a general fear that the American dream is not going to be
there for them or their children. … There is concern about trust
broken between government and the people.

Angry White people. And we are not talking about elite Whites who
wouldn’t have to worry about health care no matter what the government
does. This is racially-based populism: The protest is coming from
middle- and lower-middle-class Whites, not Blacks and Latinos in the
same social classes.

And it’s about more than health care. A month ago it was the angry
White people who support Sarah Palin. And before that, it was angry
Whites participating in "tea parties" protesting the stimulus bill.

It's not any specific issue, but a generalized fear that the country
is slipping away from them — that the Obama presidency is moving
America very rapidly into a country that they would not recognize and
where they do not have political power. Our friend, Mark Potok, of the
$PLC, comments, "Clearly, this president has set off a real rage. ...
Certain people look around and see this is not the country their white
Christian forefathers built, and they are angry."

Not that there's anything wrong with that. These angry White people
are quite right to fear such a transformation. The anti-White
revolution is working beautifully. Legal and illegal immigration is
gradually but noticeably transforming the country so that the White
populist base will have decreasing political power. By my calculation,
by 2012, the Republicans would have to attract around 63% of Whites to
get a majority (assuming Whites continue to represent 90% of the
Republican vote). In the ideal world of the left, however, this
transformation would be carried out without anger and mass protest,
apart from the occasional skinhead, swastika-painting fringe that
replenish the coffers of organizations like the $PLC and the ADL.
White people would sink peacefully into the sunset of American
politics, happily joining multicultural coalitions in both parties.

The problem for the left is the anger. With huge majorities in both
Houses of Congress and an Obama presidency that seemed committed to
nationalized health care, the “progressives” are saying the Democrats
should just push through a plan. Elections matter. We’ve got the
power, so let’s do it.

But trampling on the sensibilities of what remains a large
constituency is very risky. These voters are energized in a way they
were not during the 2008 election where the media’s slobbering love
affair with Obama (including Chris Matthews’ “thrill going up my leg”
when Obama speaks), the failed Bush presidency, the horrible economy,
and John McCain (need I say more) kept populist passions low.

The White House seems to realize that simply having a large majority
in Congress isn’t enough if a large angry minority is so enraged that
they start storming the barricades with torches and pitchforks.
Imagine the commentariat trying to explain away a 65–70% White vote
for the Republicans in 2010 or 2012. The stark racial abyss of
American politics would be staring everyone in the face. Best not to
wake the sleeping giant until it’s really too powerless to matter much
at all.

There are doubtless a great many anxieties behind this anger.
Certainly many lower-and middle-class Whites have been devastated by
the changes in the labor market brought about by massive immigration
(including the H1-B program that imports skilled workers), and many
companies cutting health benefits because of the need to compete in a
globalized economy in which American elites feel no obligation to
protect American workers. And as immigration begins to transform
cities in the heartland of America, more and more Americans are coming
face to face with the future. Indeed, I suspect the next major
outbreak of White anger will be any attempt by the Obama
administration to legalize the millions of illegals. Already, the
administration seems to be scaling back its ambitions on the
immigration front.

But I suspect that a large part of the fear is about what health care
would be like if the progressive wing of the Democratic Party got its
way. These middle class Whites envision themselves standing in line
with Blacks, Latinos, legal and illegal immigrants, and everyone else.
And they realize that in general the taxes of people like themselves
are being used to support services for people quite a bit unlike
themselves — people who pay proportionately far less of the tax burden
and are part of the coalition of minorities that is the backbone of
the Democratic Party, while 90% of the Republican vote comes from
Whites.

From an evolutionary perspective, this is a classic case of a public
goods issue in a multicultural society. As noted by Frank Salter
http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=vdare&l=ur2&o=1, because of closer
ties of kinship and culture, ethnically homogeneous societies are more
likely to be open to redistributive policies such as social welfare
and nationalized health care. European nationalized health care
systems were initiated decades ago when those countries were
ethnically homogeneous. In the US, the Medicare system was enacted in
1965 — well before the multicultural onslaught.

Some enraged Whites may also have read about the aspects of the bill
that make it “affirmative action on steroids,” including what amounts
to a quota system for "underrepresented minorities" in medical
schools. It's one thing to have affirmative action professors teaching
obscure subjects to college students. But do people really want
affirmative action doctors performing heart surgery?

The problem for advocates of universal health care in the US is that
this round of reform is being proposed at the precise point when
general anxieties about America's multicultural future are on the
minds of a whole lot of White people. It's not at all unreasonable for
them to believe that universal health care will indeed be the
embodiment of the multicultural nightmare of the future. And it's not
at all unreasonable for them to be very angry about that.

Finally, in my recent fundraising appeal letter, I suggested that the
next revolution — like the one that resulted in our current
multicultural nightmare — will be a top-down revolution that begins by
converting the elite opinion makers. This anger among non-elite
Whites suggests there is a possibility of a successful movement
energized by non-elite Whites. In the health care debate, there
certainly seems to be a prominent role of elite conservative media
figures, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, in mobilizing
hostility toward the Obama plan and validating the energy of the
protests. The question remains: Will these elite conservative voices
openly advocate what needs to be done for their constituency to really
take back the country?"


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