Only A Pawn in Their Game

White alienation is on the rise. “Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures,” according to a recent article about increasing economic insecurity published by the Associated Press. “Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.”



Such pessimism corresponds, of course, to the objective economic situation facing the majority of white Americans. As the AP explains, “While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in government data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.”

While decreasing racial disparities in the poverty rate hold out the possibility that whites and non-whites will come together in the face of shared economic immiseration to challenge the neoliberal policy regime responsible for their increasing insecurity, it is overly sanguine to believe that the collective experience of acute economic anxiety will lead inexorably to proletarian racial harmony. Indeed, the perverse racial equality promoted by neoliberalism’s program of universal dispossession is haunted by the specter of a racialized politics in which the objective social antagonisms of capitalism’s bio-polar class structure become increasingly displaced into threatening forms of populist chauvinism that could radically transform the American political landscape. As Walker has discussed at length in two recent posts, the unleashing of such reactionary forces could eventuate in a Rand Paul presidency, a scenario that harbors the possibility of accelerating national and international disintegration and hostility.

Our chances of averting such a catastrophe depend on our ability to articulate a narrative that will place the subjective experience of economic distress in an objective perspective that discloses the class-bound economic mechanisms driving contemporary inequality. As William Julius Wilson, a Harvard sociologist, tells the AP, “It’s time that America comes to understand that many of the nation’s biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position.” He goes on to caution, “There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front.”

Unless progressives, socialists, and leftists can forge such a narrative and present it alongside a political program based on the regulation of financial corporations in the public interest and the creation of jobs through large-scale investment in infrastructure, transportation, and education, rising white alienation will continue to portend reaction.