I recently read Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness, which shows how voters who support politicians and policies that appeal to white racial resentment end up turning “whiteness” into a marker of lower life expectancy, poorer health, and lower education. The book has three sections, one on gun policy, one on healthcare policy, and one on taxation & social services. It deserves a fourth, once there’s more complete research on vaccine refusal among whites.
Metzl has selected three states to examine the detrimental effect of Republican policies on Republican voters: Missouri, Tennessee, and Kansas. He chose these states because, in the 1990s, they had been leaders in the policy areas where they have since fallen far behind—Missouri on gun policy, Tennessee on health care, and Kansas on public education. Through interviews and data, we can see that what started with the exploitation of racial resentment to forge a kind of “backlash conservatism” (e.g., the Southern Strategy) has become the practice of “backlash governance”, where racial resentment is the preferred vehicle for class exploitation.
By 1968 you can’t say “n—”; that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like “forced busing”, “states’ rights”, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.
—Lee Atwater
The Guns
It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when guns weren’t a big deal in American politics. This began to change in the Sixties and Seventies, as the federal government took its first baby steps toward improved civil rights for women and non-whites. As the government slowly lost its commitment to defending white male supremacy, conservatives stepped up to do the job. It’s no coincidence that some of the most severe riots against school integration took place shortly before conservative gun fetishists took over the National Rifle Association in 1977.
Gun proliferation laws such as open & permitless (and trainingless) carry, stand-your-ground, and castle-doctrine law has only applied to whites. The reason is simple: Gun culture (indeed, our wider culture) codes white gun owners as protectors, and black gun owners as threats. White privilege allows white gun owners to be perceived automatically as good guys with guns. As a result, black lives are lost every year to police gun violence, even when the victims are law-abiding citizens (Philando Castile), even when the guns are toys (Tamir Rice).
But as dangerous as gun proliferation is for black men, the armed defense of white male authority puts white men at risk—not from police or criminals, but from themselves. Non-hispanic white men are a little over one-third of the total American population, but account for more than 4 out of 5 gun suicides. When Missouri did away with its gun laws—among the nation’s strictest in the 1990s—gun injuries and deaths, especially gun suicides, rose.
Through interviews, Metzl shows that the jump in gun suicides has had no impact on how the families of the deceased view guns. The general attitude is, If they find out our guns are killing us, they might take away our guns. This is the result of decades of advertising and propaganda (which is really two of the same thing). For example, at the time of the Sandy Hook school shooting, Bushmaster was running an advertising campaign that equated masculinity with deadly force.
Advertisers and politicians united in selling white working-class men guns at a time when the modern world was taking away their way of life. They sold them the illusion that they would exercise vigorous control over their lives by buying the product. Perhaps when such men continue to feel powerless, they turn the guns on themselves.
Health Care
Metzl then examines health care policy in Tennessee, which was once the most innovative Southern state on health policy. In the early Nineties, “TennCare” was implemented, covering millions of the state’s citizens. But when cost outstripped tax revenues, politicians gutted the program, leaving a shell behind that helped virtually no one.
The ACA, or Obamacare, came along at the right time to salvage the state’s health care system. However, when the Supreme Court sabotaged the ACA in 2012 with a bizarre ruling requiring states to opt-in to Obamacare, Tennessee Republicans shored up their electoral fortunes in an appeal to working-class whites that campaigned against a Medicaid expansion that would help all working-class families.
This appeal has worked outside of Tennessee as well. While most states have implemented some form of Medicaid expansion, most of the states of the old Confederacy have not. As has happened one generation after another, racial status trumps beneficial policy. For Republicans class exploitation precludes the promulgation of beneficial policy.
As an aside, I think it’s important to stress the class aspect of Republican policies. Class warfare is the driving factor behind the GOP’s economic policy. As Republican administrations enable more rapacious capitalism, white working-class men find themselves losing status. The only thing that has kept them from hitting bottom is the mass of black bodies that slavery and Jim Crow have pressed there. With respect to health care policy, Metzl’s interviews show too many white men concerned that the ACA would place them into networks with immigrant and minority populations.
Racial resentment enables economic exploitation again and again. While Tennessee rejected Medicaid expansion, Kentucky embraced it. Health care costs are higher in Tennessee, and health care outcomes are worse. Whites in Tennessee are poorer and less healthy than those in Kentucky. Tennessee Republicans sabotaged TennCare, which they could not have done without support from white working-class voters.
Which takes us to Kansas.
Education
As Metzl explains, Kansas had a top-ten public education system, until Sam Brownback got into the governor’s mansion. With a Tea Party legislature at his back, he implemented the perfect trickle-down economic program of tax cuts for the wealthy and big businesses, promising that the state would be showered with economic growth and jobs.
His job-growth plan started with cutting jobs. Reduced taxes led to a smaller state budget, and so began a series of layoffs. The educational system saw per-student spending fall. Programs were eliminated, fees increased, and layoffs proliferated. Destabilized state finances resulted in a downgrade in the state's credit rating. And that was just Brownback’s first term.
Despite the economic chaos, and the cuts to social programs and education, austerity was popular with white working-class voters. They helped re-elect Brownback, and got a second helping of austerity. By 2016, Kansas was in the bottom ten states in student achievement. The promised jobs never materialized; in 2016 Kansas ranked 46th in private-sector job growth. Tax increases necessary to stabilize the state’s finances meant that, once the GOP-dominated legislature was done, the poorest 40% of Kansans saw their taxes increase.
Metzl shows, through interviews and data, that Kansas became another example of how poor white populations vote for politicians who hurt them. They vote this way because one, they fear that some people who do not deserve help are getting it; and two, they feel guilty that they themselves need that help.
Austerity in Kansas buttresses what conservatives of all stripes see as the proper social order. Tax cuts ensure that the rich get richer (the richest 15% of Kansans saw overwhelming reductions in their taxes), and make sure that the system that assures their dominance remains in place. White voters who feel racial resentment will happily support a system that keeps them in their place, as long as that place isn’t at the bottom.
And now, of course, there’s COVID.
Vaccine Resistance
It’s positively Lovecraftian: To soothe the bruised ego of a misshapen orange entity, Republicans embrace blasphemies against truth and democracy. The viability of the Party depends on inculcating among its members and supporters a spirit of self-sacrifice. a willingness to suffer and perish so that the enemies of the Party can be brought down.
The current arch-enemy of the Party is, of course, Brandon Biden. Republicans know that the president and his partisans are always blamed if the country does badly. With Biden in the White House, it is their goal to see America fail. To that end, they want the pandemic to continue, as the pandemic is the most powerful weapon against the American economy.
A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed that three in ten Republicans claim they will never accept vaccination against COVID. These are the GOP’s foot soldiers in the effort to bring down the economy. There are millions of people ready to contract a lung-eating disease that could incapacitate them for a week (or a month, or indefinitely), or kill them outright, in order to give their leaders a transient political advantage. Conservative leaders are happy about it, too: Consider that America’s failure to reach Biden’s July 4th vaccination goal brought applause at CPAC in June.
This has been a long time coming. The Republican establishment, with its determination to preserve an unjust economic order, joined forces with reactionaries determined to preserve an unjust social order. At the state level and at the national level we have repeatedly seen that wealth does not trickle down, but instead congeals. Appeals to individualism have been used to attack the idea of a greater good—after all, one can’t have communism without a community, and there can’t be socialism without a society. Limited government is, and always has been, about maintaining private hierarchies of privilege and power.
A Faustian bargain preserves the power and status associated with wealth and whiteness. Wealth for the Party’s leaders, whiteness for its followers. However, wealth is real, whereas “whiteness” is an illusion, an empty promise that has been rephrased and redefined over the generations as needed. The leaders keep their money, and the followers get the psychological wages of whiteness. For people who have nothing left but their skin, its color takes on outsized social importance.
Today trickle-down economics has been entirely replaced with a system of human sacrifice, and white Americans—especially white working-class men—are willing participants. Metzl writes, “...the policies and sentiments that aim to bolster the identity of whiteness also effectively turn whiteness itself into a heightened, perilous, and ever-more-costly category of risk.” In other words, the racial resentment GOP leaders inculcate in conservative whites, and which those voters reward, assure that white Americans pay more, suffer more, and die more—and they do so gladly.
If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
—Lyndon Baines Johnson