Eduardo Porter has parsed the demographics of today’s identity politics in the US, and concludes that the angry white men supporting Trump and Cruz belong to a deep historical stratum of white identity distinctly polarized against a government that redistributes resources to non-whites and immigrants seen as undeserving. This is a nativist and racial divide that is at the heart of the startling rejection of the GOP’s traditional rhetoric and the rise of Trumpism. [Emphasis mine.]
Eduardo Porter, Racial Identity, and Its Hostilities, Return to American Politics
Racial animosity has long helped foster a unique mistrust of government among white Americans. Nonwhite voters mostly like what the government does. But many white Americans, researchers have found, would rather not have a robust government if it largely seems to serve people who do not look like them.
Americans owe their unusually minimalist state in large measure to racial mistrust. As the economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser put it in an important paper, European countries are much more generous to the poor relative to the United States mainly because of American racial heterogeneity. “Racial animosity in the U.S. makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters,” they wrote.
The eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson described two decades ago how race and economics collided. In the United States, he wrote, white taxpayers have opposed welfare because they see themselves “as being forced, through taxes, to pay for stuff for blacks that many of them could not afford for their own families.”
Scholars have found evidence for these attitudes all over the place.
For instance, Julian Betts of the University of California, San Diego and Robert Fairlie of the University of California,Santa Cruz found that for every four immigrants entering public high schools, one native student switched to a private school.
Daniel Hungerman from the University of Notre Dame found that all-white congregations became less charitable as the share of black residents in the community rose.
Perhaps because they have relied more on government programs and protections, members of minority groups have decidedly different beliefs about supporting social solidarity. Another study published by the Pew center in November found that 62 percent of white Americans would like the government to be smaller and provide fewer services. Only 32 percent of blacks and 26 percent of Hispanics agreed.
If the history of liberalism has been expanding the definition of who ‘we’ are, as Americans – to include Catholics, Germans, Italians, and Jews – many whites, even including those formerly excluded from ‘us’, just can’t accent Asians, Hispanics, and blacks in that group.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/136742280947
