Class and Race: Two Sides, Same Coin
Two op-eds by two center-right writers has me thinking about the intersection of race and class in America.
Unlike a lot of other nations, we tend to be more focused on race. Also, unlike a lot of other nations, we want to believe that class divisions don’t exist. Ross Douthat started things off by his critique of the political strategists that lead the Lincoln Project and how they tend to look down on lower-class whites. Bruce Bartlett came to the Lincoln Project’s defense, affirming the racial animus that strategist Stuart Stevens believes animated the party since the 1960s.
Sometimes our focus on race can cause us to ignore how class operates in America.
I am an African American and when people see me, they see that I am a black man. What they don’t see is that I grew up in a working-class household of two autoworkers. When we think of African Americans class distinction is never really thought about. Even though there is a black working class, people see African Americans as a race and don’t think about economic factors that might differentiate African Americans from one another.
When we do think of class, it is presented in racial terms. When I say, “working class” most people mean “white working class.” And when some people think of the white working class, it is not always in the best terms. I’ve heard them called rubes, not very smart, racist, and several other adjectives. The ones usually participating in the name-calling tend to be professional white people.
If you were to look at the intra-Republican fight in 2020, you would have to boil the differences between Trumpists and Never-Trumpers down to those who focus more on race versus those who focus more on class. (Douthat isn’t pro-Trump, but he is someone that focuses more on class than on race.)
I’m not here to say that race shouldn’t matter in America. Of course, it does. Contrary to some, racial issues didn’t cease because Martin Luther King made a speech. The killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor reminds us that people can still judge people by the color of their skin.
But race isn’t the only problem. It isn’t the biggest problem sometimes. Class is a huge issue in America, but most of us want to pretend it doesn’t exist. Race, and to a larger extent, identity and class tend to intertwine and leaders have long used racism to get people to forget about class.
But class matters and if we as a society don’t come to terms with inequality, racial issues will only get worse.
How did Donald Trump, become the choice of the primary electorate in 2016? The party had one the deepest and diverse fields ever and yet the person chosen was someone who was not fit to serve as president, let alone become the nominee. Why did this happen?
Some people believe the GOP has a voter problem. There is a lot to this belief. Republican lawmakers aren’t afraid of getting a nasty tweet from the President, but they are afraid of his supporters who will go after them.
So, yes, the voters are a problem in that they are given to conspiracy theories and racial resentment. But is that the cause or yet another symptom? Why are these people so hostile to anyone that isn’t white?
To understand that you have to understand two things: what happened in the Republican Party and what happened in the American economy. While people might think the GOP is the party of the rich, it has over time become the party for the white working class. Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat were aware of these changes and wrote Grand New Party in 2008 laying out how the GOP could become the party of America’s working class. Their suggestions weren’t considered. This was also the focus of the so-called “reformicons” before 2016.
So, when those 2016 GOP presidential candidates came forward, they didn’t push an agenda geared towards the working class. Instead, they pushed the same policy of low taxes that Republicans supported for the last 40 years. The working-class base wanted something beyond low taxes. Donald Trump spoke in a way that made many working families feel he understood them.
But that is interesting in and of itself. Donald Trump didn’t lift the Douthat and Salam’s policy prescription. Instead, he used class to speak to the white working-class mixed in with a lot of racial grievances. Trump is using the playbook of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama when he ran for president in 1968. Wallace targeted the white working class, using class as a stalking horse for racial resentment.
Why would the working-class be swayed by racial resentment? To understand that, you have to understand what was going on in the American economy over the last 50 years. Journalists Nick Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn wrote a moving opinion piece in the New York Times about how the loss of manufacturing had affected one family in Oregon. The two reporters share what they think happened to the American working class over the last half-century when the jobs left, and it sounds pretty familiar to me:
In the 1970s and ’80s it was common to hear derogatory suggestions that the forces ripping apart African-American communities were rooted in “black culture.” The idea was that “deadbeat dads,” self-destructive drug abuse and family breakdown were the fundamental causes, and that all people needed to do was show “personal responsibility.”
A Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson, countered that the true underlying problem was lost jobs, and he turned out to be right. When good jobs left white towns like Yamhill a couple of decades later because of globalization and automation, the same pathologies unfolded there. Men in particular felt the loss not only of income but also of dignity that accompanied a good job. Lonely and troubled, they self-medicated with alcohol or drugs, and they accumulated criminal records that left them less employable and less marriageable. Family structure collapsed.
It would be easy but too simplistic to blame just automation and lost jobs: The problems are also rooted in disastrous policy choices over 50 years. The United States wrested power from labor and gave it to business, and it suppressed wages and cut taxes rather than invest in human capital, as our peer countries did. As other countries embraced universal health care, we did not; several counties in the United States have life expectancies shorter than those in Cambodia or Bangladesh.
I echo their beliefs because I’ve seen it happen before my eyes. While my hometown of Flint, Michigan is predominantly African American, I saw how changes in the economy could destroy lives. Flint was the birthplace of General Motors and in the 20th century, it became the company town. Flint became synonymous with GM, and GM factories dotted the Flint area. Growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, it was common to see car carriers filled with Buicks or Chevys heading to dealerships across the nation. During that same period, the number of people working for GM was about 80,000 and the population of the city was near 200,000 people.
Then things changed. Massive changes were happening in the economy that would send Flint and other cities in the Rust Belt spinning downward. Factories became more efficient, meaning fewer people were needed. It became cheaper to build cars in places like Mexico than it was in the U.S. The dominance of the Big Three automakers ended as the gas crises of the ’70s hit and Americans were looking for more fuel-efficient cars and started buying Hondas and Toyotas. The result in Flint was that GM closed factory after factory until, today, about 8,000 people work for GM and the city’s population is now less than 100,000.
If you’re someone who loses their job and thinks a trade deal took it away and you’re worried that someone who doesn’t look like you (isn’t white) has it instead, you are going to start looking for people to blame. Donald Trump gave the white working-class an excuse, an easy answer.
Trump gave the white working-class an easy answer, but NeverTrump or Trump skeptical conservatives haven’t always shown much sympathy. Tom Nichols rightly complains how conservatives blamed African Americans for their poverty during the Reagan years, but not showing sympathy for the white working class isn’t a good answer. Yes, some of those white working-class were pretty cold when it was African Americans in a bad fix, but turnabout isn’t fair play. Whether poverty is white or black, more often than not it isn’t the fault of the people, but forces beyond their control.
The thing is, people like Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney might be heroes to NeverTrumpers like me, but they didn’t speak to the white working class. Trump did.
Some conservatives are starting to see how we treat not just the white working class but all workers matter. Picking up where Salam and Douthat left off, several conservatives are starting to think the rewards of the free market are not being felt by everyone. None of these people are advocating for socialism, but they are wondering if what has passed for conservative economics over the last 30 or 40 years has run its course. Senator Marco Rubio expressed his view on the economy with a speech at Catholic University last fall on what he calls “Common Good Capitalism.” Rubio-based Common Good Catholicism from Rerum Novarum, an 1891 Catholic Encyclical by Pope Leo XIII. In that letter, Pope Leo writes about care for the poor and the workers and speaking against the rise of socialism. Writing in the National Review, he describes what Common Good Capitalism is all about:
What we need to do is restore common-good capitalism: a system of free enterprise wherein workers fulfill their obligation to work and enjoy the resultant benefits, and businesses enjoy their right to make a profit and reinvest enough to create high-productivity jobs, which is what I mean by dignified work for Americans. Common-good capitalism also means recognizing that what the market determines is most efficient may not be best for America. For example, we’ve allowed ourselves to become almost completely dependent on China for rare-earth minerals and done nothing to further our ability to provide them for ourselves. That’s why I have filed legislation to support investment in this critical sector.
Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center is another conservative who wants conservatism to speak to the economic needs of the working class. In Olsen’s 2017 book Working Class Republican, we learn that Ronald Reagan was a “New Deal conservative”, someone who was reconciled to the fact that the New Deal was designed so that “the primacy of human dignity sanctions government help for those who need it.” While Reagan was not in favor of big government, he still believed that the government had a role in safeguarding the commonwealth.
Olsen and Rubio should be commended for taking on this issue. The downside is that both men did it at the expense of their consciences. Both men supported Trump and maybe hoped Trump could make an opening to help working Americans. They were willing to ignore the racial scapegoating if they could get their agenda through. They are also ignoring Trump’s allergy to governing. Trump could have done something to help the working class economically, but instead, he chose the cultural route, stoking resentment instead of fattening workers paychecks.
But while I have strong reservations against them for their complicity with Trump, they are on to something here that I think NeverTrumpers are missing.
In addition, Oren Cass and his think tank, American Compass are also providing solutions that will help make America a little less unequal. Their strong statement on the need for conservatives to support unions is something that is sorely needed.
However, there is a concern that a Republican Party after Trump won’t have any interest in tackling class issues. It’s hard to see Olsen and Rubio get a hearing in the current version of the Republican Party. As Tim Alberta notes, this GOP is out of ideas. It only cares about feeding red meat to its base and owning the libs. Olsen and Rubio have ideas and they are worthy ideas, but they no longer have a party that will listen to them.
So if the center-right is going to tackle inequality seriously, it will have to come from the Trump-skeptical/NeverTrump side. It can’t come from within the GOP, but from outside of it. But for that to happen, NeverTrumpers have to see race and class as issues to focus on. They have to care about working-class whites and foster greater diversity within conservatism in the United States. Both of these must go together. To focus exclusively on one means demagogues like Donald Trump will continue to bedevil America.
This means that NeverTrumpers, the old GOP establishment, must give up their obsession with tax cuts. While one can argue that the 1981 tax cuts were a good thing, you can only pull that off a few times. After a while, the middle and working classes will start to notice that they aren’t the ones benefiting from lower taxes. None of this means we must raise taxes back to their 70 percent top marginal rates of the late 1970s. But it does mean that conservatism has to mean more than just giving yet another tax cut to struggling families.
NeverTrumpers have been good at coming to terms with race. But will they come to terms with class as well? In some ways, it’s far easier to talk about race than class because focusing on race doesn’t ask them to make changes to what they believe. American conservatism focuses on the free market and views it as nothing but a good thing. Markets are beneficial, but they aren’t perfect and to admit to class means coming to terms with the imperfection of markets. They can lift people out of poverty; I’ve seen it for myself in the late 90s in China. But markets can also be limiting. Sometimes they don’t benefit everyone. I can see that, but will NeverTrumpers be willing to cross that bridge?
We have no idea if the NeverTrumpers will go back to the GOP or create something new, but they need to be able to wake up as to why they lost to Trump and learn from that experience, especially when it comes to helping working families. One way they can do this is by adopting an American version of “One Nation Conservativism.” Writing for the Niskanen Center, former chair of the Washington state Republican Party, he urges both political parties to adopt this approach which is a staple of British conservatism. Former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli devised this philosophy describing some of the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution on how government should best respond:
We have become two nations — the rich and the poor — between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.
Disraeli believed there was a massive class divide that had to be healed. The way you heal it is through programs that can shrink the distances between classes. Vance offers some ideas to both parties on what could be an American version of One Nation Conservatism. Such a program would include health care reform, immigration reform, free trade that includes help for workers affected by trade, and ample funding for safety-net programs.
So, why should an African American like me care about how we treat the white working-class? Because as long as they don’t have access to good-paying jobs, they will listen whenever a racist Svengali like Trump tells them the people they should be angry with are the black and brown people. So, looking after the interests of this segment of America is at some level about self-interest. If we don’t deal with the issue of class, it will make racial tensions worse, not better.
Douthat and Bartlett don’t realize that their disagreement is two sides of the same coin. What is needed is to develop a conservative economic policy for the 21st century that pays attention to and lifts the working class, and stop selling a policy that worked 40 years ago. If racial reconciliation is to make progress in America, attention must be paid to the working class.
We ignore it at America’s peril…
One of the ways class and race intersect is that increasingly, blue collar jobs are filled by people of color.
Notice how there is a lot of talk about “farmers” (white people) but never any talk about “farmworkers” (Hispanic immigrants). The slaughterhouses, meatpacking plants, construction jobs are likely to be performed by people who don’t look anything like the guy on the left in the header photo, but a lot like the people on the right.
Another is the rise of “pink collar” jobs like health care aides, clerical and service jobs where these too are often held by females of color.
For the political and media class who write about these issues, those people are invisible, and their needs and agendas are unimportant.Report
And those pink collar jobs are often middle class. Perhaps on the low end of that range, but still there. But yes, it’s not the wage, it’s the status of the job. Hand in hand with talk of class is the status we place upon jobs. Doctors and RNs have status, CNAs do not. Engineers have status, drywallers do not. CEOs have status, the clerks who keep the business humming along do not.Report
FollowReport
See Also: The Joads.Report
Status gets assigned to a job in large part depending on who is doing the job.
When a job category is dominated by those of the low status group, the job itself becomes low status.Report
There was a time when being a secretary to some poobah was a prestigious — and male — job.Report
There is this anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, about how the first telephone operators were all men, when they was considered a highly technical and advanced job, then when it became more focused on being deferential and pleasing to the caller, the job became feminized and fell in status.
I think of that when I see those AT&T commercials with that cute young girl, where the main feature is that she is pretty, nonthreatening, deferential and endlessly smiling and pleasing.
This isn’t a coincidence. In the service economy, where the customer is king, the service worker is…a servant.
The real life Lilys have to grovel not only to the boss, but to anyone who walks in the door.The real young women who fill these jobs are low status since they are stripped of any adult authority and relegated to the position of being helpful children.
Their work itself is regarded as being barely a step above mowing the lawn or babysitting.
And so these jobs are both low status and low paying, yet when media types go hunting for a representative of the “working class” people like this are never found, but instead yet another white guy in a hard hat is profiled.Report
That is an apocryphal anecdote. The reason why telephone operators switched from male to females is that females were educated to be deferential and pleasing because of what 19th century people thought was proper decorum. Young women were essentially came socialized for the job and their employers didn’t need to break them in like they did for young men.Report
I concur in part and dissent in part. There is a history of using race to divide the class interests. This is undeniable. Race was and is used in the South to prevent union drivers among other things. But there is also an Anglo/Scots-Irish heritage in many parts of the South which was hostile to unionism compared to the North where unionism was largely driven by groups we consider “white ethnic” today.
But there is a kind of person on the left, often but not always a Jacobin/Rose Twitter/Bernie or Buster, who thinks that you can solve racism by addressing class issues and I am not sure that is true. I think a large part of this view is because they hate the current composition of the Democratic Party’s big tent which consists of minorities of all classes, union members, and often upper-middle class whites with professional jobs aka dreaded Park Slope/Noe Valley/Pearl District liberals*. There is a desire to see progressive party based entirely on the working class.
I don’t think this can happen. Race is a distinct enough issue that it needs to be addressed on its own and on the merits. The sin of racism and slavery is so deeply entwined in American history that it perverts everything it touches. Nearly everyone in the United States is infected by this on some level including the most radical whose attempts to address racism often lead them to dismiss other forms of prejudice via over correction. See Vicky “I’m an idiot” Osterweil turned a Korean immigrant into a white person in her moronic “defense: of looting because she needed it to fit in her world view.
*The irony of the Jacobin set is that more often than not (like nearly all the time), they come from the same upper middle-class backgrounds as the people they deplore the most. They also often show no real effort in getting rid of the various privileges of their class and wealth. Walker Bragman, Nathan Robinson, Bhrianna Gray, Meagan Day are all trust funders with expensive educations and often formerly held expensive jobs.Report
I agree with the OP. You could try to address race on it’s own, but you will be more effective if you address race and class together.Report
I think it is nice in theory but not realistic given American history on the matter.Report
Nikole Hannah-Jones makes the point that the children blue collar, working class white families usually go to schools with white children of different classes. However, the children of black working class families usually go to school with mostly other blacks.
I always point out that this is a function of living locations. Working class whites usually do not live in the center of large urban areas. Cities like Boston, NYC, Los Angeles, Chicago have very few white children in the public schools because there are few working class whites that live in those cities. Working class white families in the exurbs or more rural areas that they will live away from blacks but near upper middle class whites.Report
Excellent essay, Dennis.
Part of the problem is that while race does need to be addressed, the Robin DiAngelo/Ibram X. Kendi method is not going to work.
I’d love for class to be addressed, but if class is addressed with as much deftness as race has been, we’ll end up in more or less the same place within weeks.
I mean, remember the arguments we used to have about “Privilege”? Man, that stuff got co-opted within *SECONDS*. It stopped being a criticism appropriate for kids who had their college paid for by a trust fund and started being used for kids who got in on scholarship. Hey! Check your privilege, Charlotte Clymer yelled at Briahna Joy Gray.
And now we’re off to the races.
When it’s something that addresses making lives better, it’s a good thing.
When it’s something that addressed jockeying for position, it’s a bad thing.
And the people in charge of leading the discussion at the highest levels seem to be the ones who got very, very good at jockeying for position.Report
Privilege is infinite… co-opt Privilege as something we need to build constantly. See also: The Joads.Report
“When we think of African Americans class distinction is never really thought about.”
That’s an interesting sentence.
First of all, it’s been my experience that most people don’t care about race or class, but about behaviour. They may generalize behavioural patterns to races to classes, but the root of any animosity is the behaviour. At least that tends to be true in America. That’s important because this isn’t a nation of a people, but a nation of an idea. I guess you could take it further and say that the real root of tension is the ideas that underlie behaviours, but that’s a tension that doesn’t have to erupt into animosity unless it becomes visible.
I don’t think Americans see class at all, but groupings of people with similar behaviours. The most important statement about class in the US in the past 30 years was Chris Rock’s observation about two types of black people. That was an observation about classes in the sense of common group action. It’s nearly identical to things that Conan O’Brien has said about growing up Irish. As this article notes, the patterns of bad behaviour have nothing to do with race, except as certain underlying employment issues have hit different races at different times.
For what it’s worth, Dennis – I doubt that more than 10% of all people see you as black without reference to behavioural group. Conservative whites might want to suck up to you a little bit out of guilt, and liberal whites might want to suck up to you a little bit out of guilt, but otherwise people are only interested in whether you’ll make the lives of those around you better or worse.Report
Good piece Dennis. The importance of talking about both class and race seems to have befuddled every overarching label/group. Lord knows it has divided the broader left for decades. Even this year Bernie/D’s were arguing over whether to focus or talk about one or the other. It’s always been both but talking about more then one factor with two simplistic ends seems beyond so many.
If there is anything to effectively do about it D’s/liberals should focus policy that will help the general working class letting the positive effects help across groups. Don’t focus on which small division it will help since that is bringing out the nasty tribal thing our hate mongers love to monger over.Report
Mexico focuses on both class and race, and recognizes how deeply they’re intertwined. It seems to make discrimination more logical, consistent, and pervasive.Report
Thanks for writing this. I spend a lot of time disagreeing with all the progressives on this site. It is refreshing to have a chance to disagree just as vehemently with a conservative.
“We have become two nations — the rich and the poor…”
This is not true. According to the 2014 NYT editorial (with graphics!) over their working lives,”56 percent will find themselves in the top 10 percent, and a whopping 73 percent will spend a year in the top 20 percent of the income distribution.” IOW, income class is dynamic and changes, with most people getting to the upper class for at least part of their working life.
“So, why should an African American like me care about how we treat the white working-class?”. Ummm… how about because they are fellow human beings and because we believe we judge people by their character rather than their color? You may not have meant it that way, but your comment comes across as totally racist.
“The killings of George Floyd… reminds us that people can still judge people by the color of their skin.”
I am not aware there has been any evidence that race had anything to do with this. Other than what people projected onto the event afterward.
May I make a suggestion? How about NOT trying to segment human beings into categories and then pursue tribal, zero sum, is vs them, solutions? Of course if you did this, you may not be a conservative any more.
Reminds me what is wrong with the GOP though. Thanks.Report
Yes. The *interpretation* of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor reminds us that people can still judge people by the color of their skin.Report
Nice article. I’ve joked that while the Refomicons were definitely on to *something* their ideas were still too wonky and ultimately dependent upon tax credits and excel charts calculating an EIC for families to motivate any sort of movement. Then came Trump.
Similar to what I’ve said in the other thread about Unions… once the Republican party decides to stop digging, there’s some good earth in your post for them to start working on filling in the holes. I have no idea if they will.
I’ll admit I’m suspicious of Rubio as I don’t think he’s got backing from people who will allow him to do anything more than co-opt some rhetoric. He doesn’t have the heft or juice to go his own way. Mitt will end his days as Senator to Utah; as well he should.Report
This is a thought-provoking piece. I guess one difference between the two is public discussions of class tend to take place in the way the one you are describing has. To wit, person numer 1 from an upper middle class background with an ivy league education who now works at a think tank argues about working class needs with person number 2 from an upper middle class background with an ivy league education who now works as a columnist for the NYTimes.
And it’s hard to imagine say an all-white panel discussion on the black experience in America that wouldn’t be called out. But we end up debating whether Ross Douthat or Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump speaks more to the experience of the laboring class!
So thank you for your perspective on this.Report