Eduardo Porter writes for the New York Times:
Race, of course, has shaped political choices for a long time. The Republican takeover of the South is understood by scholars as a reaction to whites’ sense of betrayal after the Democratic push for desegregation under President Lyndon Johnson.
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.
Notably, minorities in the United States have never held much power. They are unlikely to feel that political influence to direct and constrain what government does is slipping away.
The rich democracies of the West are living through strange times. In Europe, voters are increasingly drawn to xenophobic politics, driven, according to the former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, by fear “based on the instinctive realization that the ‘white man’s world’ — a lived reality assumed by its beneficiaries as a matter of course — is in terminal decline.”
Right-wing parties, Mr. Fischer added, are replacing the notion of a nation built on a shared commitment to a common constitutional and legal order with an ethnic definition of nationhood, derived from common descent and religion. White Europeans, in other words, are circling the wagons.
A few years ago it looked as if the United States — long more tolerant of immigration, with a more fluid sense of national identity that readily allowed for hyphenation — could avoid this turn.
But judging by this year’s political debate, held against the background of improving but still insufficient prosperity, Americans are moving in the same direction. Racial identity and its attendant hostilities appear to be jumping from their longstanding place in the background of American politics to the very center of the stage.
