Kentucky voters who supported Republican Matt Bevin in his race for Governor began to recognize a sickening reality in the weeks after the election. Many of them had effectively voted away their access to health care.

Stories about these voters took on a consistently hostile tone, criticizing their foolish vulnerability to racist appeals. That reaction is not only unfair, but deeply counter-productive. White Americans, especially those dependent on disappearing blue-collar jobs for their livelihood are not voting against their interests when they respond to racially-tinged populist appeals. Until we understand the concrete, structural significance of white supremacy to our economy and our political order we will continue to be baffled by the behavior of millions of influential white voters.

Late in his life, Dr. Martin Luther King began to shift the focus of his work beyond race toward poverty. King held out the charitable belief that elevating the awareness of lower income whites to their condition might offer a pathway to a post-racial coalition among America’s lower-earners. He described his insights in a 1968 sermon, centered on his conversations with police while he was jailed in Birmingham. Here’s a digest of his comments on that interaction:

“And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, “Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us. You’re just as poor as Negroes.” And I said, “You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor, because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white.”

As he was wont to do, King spread a Hallmark-card sheen on that interaction, but his jailers did not set him free. They did not join hands with him. They did not march by his side then or at any time after.

For all his many insights, King seems to have failed to perceive what professor Derrick Bell would describe thirty years later. In the strictest sense, blue collar white workers were not voting against their interest by supporting racist politicians. They were rallying around their last tie to a form of racial solidarity that for centuries had delivered meaningful, material rewards. Voters in the Kentucky counties most desperately dependent on the welfare state voted overwhelmingly for Romney in 2012 and elected a Tea Party extremist Governor in 2015. By the same logic, that cohort of voters is flocking to Donald Trump and ignoring Bernie Sanders.

The material rewards of racism are as real as the bars that separated King from his jailers. On one side were men who held secure government jobs for life. Though their incomes were modest, they enjoyed guaranteed health care and a pension. The machinery of a deeply oppressive system was calibrated to spare them from its most violent tendencies. Those men saw (and sometimes meted out) the worst abuses that system could deliver. By virtue of the racial heritage they shared with wealthier whites, they enjoyed a thin, but vital degree of protection. Those jailers held down government jobs with pensions for one reason and one reason only – their skin color. And they knew it.

On the other side of the bars were men with few economic prospects, despised, and subjected to relentless oppression, humiliation and violence. The only crime those prisoners had committed was their defiance of white supremacy. King’s jailers recognized that race was the only force keeping them outside that cage. They feared what would happen to them if black citizens were given equal treatment. Many white voters continue to see that same potential in the growth of a post-racial America, their last tie to their modest collection of privileges cut, the last advantages and protections of their race terminated. White support for the likes of Donald Trump or Ted Cruz emerges from a terrible logic that we ignore at our peril.

In King’s lifetime we were already experiencing the dawn of a new global capitalist order, bringing with it innovation, prosperity and disruption on an unprecedented scale. For all our present angst about income inequality, the trend toward extreme outcomes we see today was already in motion by the late 50’s. An economy built more on talent than on muscle respects only one color – green. Racial preferences were standing in the way of a new world of profit. King had a potent ally he never recognized.

As the knowledge economy shifts into second gear it is fueling greater and greater variation in incomes. Those with the education, positioning and drive to get in the game have a chance to reap inordinately large payoffs. Those who do not compete successfully get less than in the past. It is an economy of extremes. That thick layer of predictable, middle income jobs is thinning steadily.

An obvious solution might be to deliver a basic level of income and lifestyle for everyone, without regard for old concerns about “need.” Pay for it with taxes on the higher earners who made it into the express lanes of the knowledge economy. Those who want to reap the rewards of the knowledge economy will be free to do so. Those who either don’t want that high-pressure, high-speed lifestyle, or for some reason cannot perform there, will be prevented from falling into penury.

One glaring political problem blocks this move. A large minority of US voters who might seem like the prime beneficiaries of this reform are determined not to go there. Lower income whites, especially in the South, are not interested in a new deal. They want to restore the old one.

Under the old deal, white men got preferential access to all of the best jobs available. Generations of white families earned their living in the fire or police departments, or worked in road construction, sanitation, or public works. Sons worked alongside fathers in union jobs at a local factory. They had every reason to expect that their children would have a chance to follow in the family tradition.

Global capitalism and the rise of the knowledge economy destroyed that simple, yet dignified way of life. As the demands of competition intensified, political will behind generations of racial preferences broke down. Race and gender-based protections for whites weakened or melted away.

Economic outcomes for those who earned an education, moved to big cities, and poured themselves into an exciting and demanding competition bloomed. Capitalism drove down the price of practically everything except for the labor of a smart, talented, educated human being. Salaries for educated professionals exceed anything broadly available just a generation ago while the range of products and services available for that money has exploded. For many, this is a bright new age of wonder, defined by affluence, freedom and seemingly endless potential.

Those who had hoped to join their uncles at the assembly line, in local government or public service jobs found fewer options available. Most importantly, in political terms they faced fresh competition from those who had been locked out of those roles in the past. People who, from their perspective, were the most American Americans, found their relative lifestyles dented, unable to achieve the economic security a previous generation of blue collar whites took for granted. Meanwhile, for all their continuing struggles, minority families have seen their relative incomes and well-being improve.

Whites with a college education and a chance to earn a living in a professional or technical field seldom have more than a distant attachment to racism, varying by how much they’ve learned or how much exposure they’ve had to a wider world. For those who come from a blue-collar tradition, especially manufacturing, mining or public service families, this new world is a rapidly unfolding catastrophe. They aren’t just falling behind, they are dying off.

Expanded access to Medicaid isn’t merely a poor compensation for what they’ve lost, it’s a stinging insult. White racial solidarity across income levels cannot be dismissed as a sentimental attachment, an opiate for the white masses. It has always been a cornerstone of their well-being. From the perspective of blue collar workers, affluent whites pushing “political correctness” or “diversity” are traitors. Having climbed the ladder they are sawing off the bottom rungs.

What the Trumps and Cruz’s of the world offer these voters is a chance to put the genie back in the bottle. They want to restore an America that reserves its bounty for “good, hard-working” white people, where women know their place and behave as humble, modest women should. Where a white man doesn’t need to slog through years of “socialist indoctrination” at some godless university to earn a chance at honest work. They offer a government that will ‘take my country back’ blocking a mythical wave of greedy newcomers who haven’t earned their place from stealing what little is left over after the wealthy take their share. They promise to put “uppity” minorities in their place, suppressing the supposed wave of crime and general thievery perpetrated by lesser races who would steal from the more deserving.

Want to convince lower income white Americans that they are voting against their interests? Explain how you can offer them something better than white supremacy. When we understand what white supremacy actually delivered for these folks, the scale of our challenge in building a just post-racial society becomes evident.

Perhaps King failed to recognize the depth of the challenge he faced in trying to forge an alliance with lower income whites. That said King didn’t become an American secular saint by setting modest goals. No one who is serious about challenging racism in America should ignore the structural, functional importance of bigotry.

With that obstacle squarely in sight the power of our Goliath becomes clear. So does his weakness. King always insisted that peace was inseparable from justice. Once we recognize that racism in America is more than just a moral compromise or a product of ignorance, we start to see the flaw in our efforts to date. Our approach to racism over the past forty years has placed the bill for white supremacy at the feet of the white families who benefited least. Affluent whites have walked away and retained their accumulated rewards.

Until we address this imbalance we will continue to be hounded by populist politicians profiting from fear and hate. The longer we ignore the problem, the more powerful will be our reckoning. This devil will have his due.

“Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes…Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws…With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law.”
Alexander Stevens on the Confederate Constitution, 1861

“Well down here, they see things a little differently…people down here feel that some things are worth killing for.”
Agent Monk (Gene Hackman), from Mississippi Burning

“Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.”
Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well

For much of our history, those who fought to free America from racial bigotry were animated by a common idea. They saw racism as a glitch, a bug in our collective software, rooted in our heritage of slavery, inspired by ignorance, and exorcised by the light of reason. As such, racism could be moved to the margins of society through legal action and education until it might one day be eradicated.

In the decades after the Civil Rights Acts, a new pessimism began to spread in some quarters. Faced with what seemed like slow progress on the ground, some began to question the assumptions that inspired previous generations of activists. Harvard law professor Derrick Bell perhaps best articulated this alternative theory of America’s racial dilemma.

What Bell recognized, and missed, in his picture of American race relations resonates now in the rise of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and an increasingly unapologetic white nationalist movement on the right. Bell’s work deserves a much closer look as we ponder how to adapt to the surprisingly explosive challenges posed by the decline of white supremacy.

With Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, published in 1992, Bell described an alternative to the prevailing narrative on race. He focused on two interlocking conclusions. First, racism in American culture and politics is not bug, but a feature. It was wired into the American experience at birth and plays a vital role in sustaining our unique approach to democracy. Bell argues that this first premise dictates the second, that racial discrimination in American culture is permanent and immutable.

Communicating this idea requires more than a one or two-sentence quote. Here are some relevant passages from Faces:

The critically important stabilizing role that blacks play in this society constitutes a major barrier in the way of achieving racial equality…Whites are rallied on the basis of racial pride and patriotism to accept their often lowly lot in life, and encouraged to vent their frustration by opposing any serious advancement by blacks. Crucial to this situation is the unstated understanding by the mass of whites that they will accept large disparities in economic opportunity in respect to other whites as long as they have a priority over blacks and other people of color for access to the few opportunities available…

The permanence of this “symbiosis” ensures that civil rights gains will be temporary and setbacks inevitable. Consider: In this last decade of the twentieth century, color determines the social and economic status of all African Americans, both those who have been highly successful and their poverty- bound brethren whose lives are grounded in misery and despair…

I want to set forth this proposition, which will be easier to reject than refute: Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary “peaks of progress,” short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it, not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defiance.

We identify with and hail as hero the man or woman willing to face even death without flinching. Why? Because, while no one escapes death, those who conquer their dread of it are freed to live more fully. In similar fashion, African Americans must confront and conquer the otherwise deadening reality of our permanent subordinate status. Only in this way can we prevent ourselves from being dragged down by society’s racial hostility. Beyond survival lies the potential to perceive more clearly both a reason and the means for further struggle.

Bell’s assessment was pretty glum, initially inspiring heated resistance at both ends of the political spectrum. Recent developments strongly suggest that the picture he paints of American racism was, at least in a sense, far too pessimistic. Unfortunately, discovering that Derrick Bell was only half-wrong is an introduction to a much more troubling epoch ahead.

Americans often think of race as though it were real, a concrete biological status, a fact of nature. Bell’s analysis forces us to look past race as a condition and instead recognize it as a concept defined by a function it performs. Biases and prejudices related to heritage, tribe, language, religion and other factors are a universal human condition every culture must manage. Race, as it is experienced here, is a uniquely American notion. “Black” and “white” as we understand them are concepts invented here to preserve a slave economy in an otherwise free society.

Here’s a strangely hopeful and yet terribly dangerous possibility. Race as an organizing principle in our culture is weakening and perhaps even dying. A younger generation born after the death of Jim Crow has increasingly little sense of “whiteness” compared to their ancestors, so little in fact that race is ceasing to function for a majority of them as a pillar of political organization. Bell may actually have been wrong about the permanence of racism in the US – and that may give rise to a frightening problem.

Happy as we might be to prove Bell wrong on the permanence of racism, he nonetheless seems to have been right about the centrality of race to our political order. Our slowly advancing success in the battle to dismantle white supremacy is weakening load-bearing walls in our democracy. Alliances that held together our uniquely “classless” political/economic system have been rendered meaningless by the decline of racism as legitimate political expression. We have not yet figured out how to replace the functions that racism performed in making America operate effectively.

This problem is most apparent in the decline of our so-called “Middle Class.” Observers from elsewhere in the world are almost as baffled by our middle class myth as they are by our racial complexities. Millionaire politicians and construction workers are “middle class.” College professors and postal workers are “middle class.” Everyone who works for a living, or worked for a living at one point in life, regards themselves and each other as “middle class” no matter how obviously wealthy, poor, or disadvantaged they are – so long as they are white or want to identify with whites. In America, “middle class” simply means “us.”

Some point to income or wealth concentration to explain current American middle class angst, but that concentration is not new. Incomes and wealth have been moving toward the extremes since the end of the World War II era. If anything, those statistics paint a hopeful picture as the number of people gaining ground, especially in recent years far exceeds those declining.

Voters on the left have always worried about income inequality. Sanders’ fans in a different era worried just as much about the supposed unfairness of Kennedy’s tax cuts as they did about Reagan’s or Bush’s. What’s new is concern about income fairness on the political right. That concern has nothing to do with income inequality per se. The right has discovered a new interest in fairness because of who is benefiting from this economy. Dig into the numbers and the real source of angst becomes clear. Conservatives are not concerned about families losing ground, they are concerned about which families are losing ground.

A far more open, free, competitive and dynamic economy is opening up opportunity for the first time to minority families. Despite the significant headwinds and setbacks, it is those families who are capitalizing on this chance to move up in relative terms. The only demographic group losing ground in absolute terms is lower-income, mostly rural whites with little education. This, along with a black President, is the only new or recent development in our sixty year trend toward income inequality. It isn’t hard to understand what white voters mean when they howl their determination to “take our country back.”

A vast expansion of freedom and wealth spawned by global capitalism is remaking economies and cultures all over the world. Here in America those forces are slowly crushing an old order that reserved special protections for a large class of people on the basis of racial identity and at the expense of racial minorities. Race itself is breaking down as a means of defining identity. The decline of this racial order is a happy development, so hopeful and promising that many smart, insightful thinkers until recently thought it might be impossible.

For two centuries, America stunted class conflicts by channeling the frustrations of lower-income voters into racial discrimination. The brazen quote from Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stevens cited above sums up the formula for American racial unity. Less fortunate whites, locked out of access to opportunity, were persuaded to lay down their lives to protect wealthy slave holders in exchange for the borrowed dignity of an ersatz “whiteness” and a collection of small-scale economic preferences set aside for them alone. That same maneuver succeeded over and over in American history to paste over resource conflicts that might otherwise have had a very different outcome. Imagine, for example, if blacks had been allowed to participate in the 19th century labor movement.

That logic of whiteness was not unique to the Southern states. To varying degrees around the country it prevailed to form the core of a common American identity. Remove the dignity and privilege that has always accompanied a white identity in America you will have to replace it with something – quickly. In a morally complex sense, less advantaged white Americans have a valid point about the unfairness of this emerging order. They are, in a very real sense, writing the check that pays for a more just and prosperous society for everyone else. More on that to come.

Every new achievement brings fresh evolutionary challenges in its wake. The problems we face now are in some sense enviable, but we need to work fast to capitalize on their promise. We desperately need to build a new template for American representative government before the roof of the old one crashes down on our heads.

History’s best explanation of the role and persistence of racism, the definitive clip from the film Mississippi Burning:

I intended to put together a simple little post about the recent Pew Research Center report on the shrinking middle class, then I waded into the data. This is going to take more time and thought. So for now, here’s a summary of some interesting things happening in the world.

From the Southern Poverty Law Center: A very long and yet still incomplete account of white supremacist terror attacks in recent years

From the Washington Post: How mass transit options transform a neighborhood

From the Texas Tribune: Texas remains the national leader in number of uninsured citizens. And also, of course, in LIBERTY.

From the Washington Post: Vegetarian diets are not necessarily more “green”

From Quartz: A fun realization dawns on everyone who attempts any real genealogical research – Everyone is your cousin

From Aeon: On a related note, what should geneticists do when they uncover a family secret?

And since we’re on a role and many of us have some serious family time approaching, this PBS program with Dr. Henry Louis Gates called Finding Your Roots stumbled over both of those issues. The new season starts in January.

From the New York Times: Here’s a little sample of the controversy the show has inspired already. Some of those episodes are pretty tense.

From the Washington Post: This is what happens when the Arctic warms twice as fast as the rest of the plant

From the Basic Income Network: A detailed look at Finland’s plans to experiment with a basic income

From CNN: Could Trump run as an independent? Lots of maybes

From ScienceDaily: Old, but evergreen research result shows that terrorism makes us stupid

From the GOPLifer archives: Just in time for your Christmas Eve nativity scene, finding meaning in the contradictions between the two Christmas stories in the Bible

Maybe there’s a certain political nerd on your list this year, or you’re just looking for a good read over the holidays. Naturally, The Politics of Crazy should be at the top of your list for them, but here are a few other titles that either caught my attention this year or seem particularly timely.

NON-FICTION

Our Man in Charleston: Britain’s Secret Agent in the Civil War South
Christopher Dickey

Assembled from the records of Robert Bunch, Britain’s Consul in Charleston in the Civil War era. Bunch grew fiercely opposed to slavery as his exposure to the practice deepened. Life in Charleston for a slavery opponent was delicate and at times dangerous, even for a representative of the crown. His observations of Southern politics are depressingly timely as some habits of delusion, racism, and propaganda just won’t die.

Alexander Hamilton
Ron Chernow

While Jefferson ran from combat and slept with his slave, Alexander Hamilton was busy being a badass in every conceivable manner. He learned economics at night while fighting with Washington’s army. He developed economic plans for the new Republic that eliminated a debt crisis and put the Northern states on the path to capitalism. He rescued new nation from a rebellion that nearly tore it apart. And he played the leading role in developing a Constitution that could allow the new country to survive. Chernow’s comprehensive biography of our most important founder is essential reading.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History
Sven Beckert

How could a Republic built on the notion that all men are created equal sustain a slave economy for most of its history? Beckert takes a close look at the development stages of capitalism to find an answer. He uses cotton to illustrate how capitalism forces the evolution of the political cultures around it and how the needs of capitalism evolve with rising wealth. He also introduces the idea of “war capitalism” to describe that strange stage of semi-free market capitalism that marketed Southern states up to the end of Jim Crow.

Countdown to Zero-Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon
Kim Zetter

Across fifteen years of “war on terror” our most profound success remains little known and largely secret. Nevertheless, its impact casts a shadow over the future of our national security and war-fighting efforts, threatening to eliminate completely the boundary between combatants and non-combatants in global conflicts. Zetter manages to make a complex technical subject – the development and proliferation of digital weapons – remarkably accessible while telling a story that’s tough to put down.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee

Few of us seem to be aware of the ways that our technological development is outstripping our political and cultural evolution. The Second Machine helps explain why our world seems so much faster than in the past, why that’s a good thing, and what we need to do to adapt.

Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates

Composed as an answer to James Baldwin’s 1963 work, The Fire Next Time, in many ways it seems more in the tradition of The Autobiography of Malcom X. Coates book has earned attention for its beautiful expressive prose delivered in an unapologetically grim and defiant tone. Beneath the surface sits a message that this blogger desperately wishes conservatives would recognize. Coates, like Malcolm X before him, is defining a black identity that is fundamentally conservative in nature. With its emphasis on independence and economic progress, Coates is quietly revealing an opportunity conservatives could seize if we could move past our deeply embedded racism. This is some of the best writing I read all year, absolutely brilliant.

FICTION

The Leftovers
Tom Perrota

One day, with no warning, a global event occurs that shatters the credibility of both science and religion. Perrota has devised the perfect metaphor for the human condition in our era, where neither religion nor reason seems capable of providing a reliable basis for meaning. In The Leftovers, a sudden disappearance of a significant portion of the population, with no conceivable relationship to merit, faith, or theology and no scientific explanation leaves a population grieving and disoriented.

Most people muddle on more or less as before, but a creeping insanity lurks beneath the surface. Disruptive and sometimes dangerous cults emerge to fill the void. Tension between those struggling to go as they did before and those desperate to find meaning at any cost fray the social fabric of a small town, hinting at larger and more dangerous tensions in the wider world.

Perrota’s book is the basis of the brilliant and deeply unsettling HBO series which I highly recommend. Season two is particularly powerful and disturbing. And by the way, if you ever wondered why the Romans were so hostile toward early Christians, this book delivers a subtle and convincing answer.

Super Sad True Love Story
Gary Shteyngart

This book becomes more relevant with each passing year. Shteyngart’s relentlessly and purposely vulgar take on the shallowness of Internet culture is darkly hilarious and prescient. It makes a fine counter-point to The Second Machine Age. If you like Vonnegut or Heller you’ll love Shteyngart. It’s as funny as Catch-22 or One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.

Lord of the Flies
William Golding

You probably had to read this in the 7^th grade. In light of all that’s happened since, it might be a good idea to read it again. For decades George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm defined our worst vision of what we might experience in the world. Turns out we should have paid more attention to Golding. Between Lord of the Flies and The Leftovers, we have everything we need to understand the global strategic threats we face in the world after Communism, from the Middle East to Mississippi.

Hearing Donald Trump blather on in a 24 hour repeating loop can be depressing, but don’t let it distract you. Far more important things are happening in the world beyond politics and they are fantastically hopeful. This is an amazing time to be alive and things keep getting better. Here are a few examples:

Engineers at Blue Origin have managed to land a rocket successfully.

Solar energy is hitting its tech-efficiency curve. Costs are plummeting, approaching parity with coal on utility scales.

Adjusted for inflation, gas prices haven’t been this low since the 60’s – and still clean energy is booming. Despite cheap fuel, the electric car business continues to experience spectacular sales growth and enormous new R&D investment.

Marijuana has been legal in Colorado for almost three years. Still waiting on the negative impacts. None are evident.

Contrary to popular belief, violent crime in the US has declined to a 40-year low and continues to taper off.

Fewer police officers died in the past few years than in any similar period in our history. Officer deaths are approaching new lows not seen for a century. We are becoming a remarkably mature and orderly society, with an urban life that has never been cleaner, safer, or more prosperous.

Abortion rates have dropped to their lowest level since the procedure was made universally legal. Increased access to contraception, improved sex education, and plummeting rates of teen pregnancy together fed the decline.

In a closely related dynamic, global birth rates are declining rapidly.

Development of Crispr-Cas9 has made human gene editing a practical medical treatment.

Next year engineers will be deploying the first major test of the “ocean cleanup array,” a cheap simple approach to removing garbage from the ocean’s gyres.

Nevermind the hot air, unless a Republican candidate in the US breaks sharply with the current racist tone of the party’s policies and rhetoric, the GOP nominee has no credible path to the White House in 2016 or beyond. The math just doesn’t work.

We are wired to see problems and keen to pick up bad news. Meanwhile the world keeps getting radically better at rates that would have been hard to believe just a lifetime ago. Chin up, this is a great time to be alive.