What follows is a press release from Joan Walsh’s publisher, the Democratic National Committee’s Wiley Division.
What's the Matter with White People?: Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was
Joan Walsh
ISBN: 978-1-1181-4106-9
Hardcover
288 pages
August 2012
Contact the publicist:
Matt Smollon
msmollon@wiley.com
(201) 748-6339
•
June 20, 2012
Hoboken, NJ
WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH WHITE PEOPLE?: Why We Long for a Golden Age that Never Was
In the wake of the Wisconsin recall, Democratic strategists are again wringing their hands over losing the white working class to the GOP. It is remarkable the extent to which the Republican Party has become the party of white men. Still, it is hard to see how the Democrats can win elections, much less bring the sweeping change they say this country needs, without winning more white voters.
In WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH WHITE PEOPLE?: Why We Long for a Golden Age that Never Was, longtimeSalon editor and MSNBC analyst Joan Walsh explains that America’s fundamental divide--the biggest obstacle to unity and progress—is not about parties or ideology or race, but how each side believes we got here.
She started by asking herself, if we are the 99 percent, why do we so often fail to get a majority of the country to listen to us? The answer is in that chasm of understanding. One side sees an America that has spent the last forty years bankrupting the country providing benefits and advantages to the underachieving, the immoral, and the undeserving, no matter the cost to Middle America. The other sees an America that has spent the last forty years bankrupting the country providing benefits and advantages to the very rich, while allowing a measure of cultural progress for the different and the downtrodden. It matters which side is right, and how the other side got things so wrong.
Joan Walsh grew up working class Irish Catholic, she’s seen both sides up close, and she can translate between these two sides like few others can. In WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH WHITE PEOPLE? she revisits the key moments in these two narratives, explaining that middle class white men really do have something to be angry about, reminding us that the size and stability of the American middle class was once the envy of the world. Did anyone realize that world as we knew it was going to end in 1973? Wages began to stagnate for white men (while inflation and unemployment were rising) at the same moment African Americans, women, public sector workers, immigrants and other so-called "outsiders" finally began to make progress. It's impossible to overstate how important that dynamic was not just to rise of Reagan Democrats, but to the shaping of most Republicans' worldview.
Walsh outlines the way government built the middle class from the 1930s through the early 70s, with new labor rights and social insurance programs, plus education, housing and development programs financed by high tax rates. Our failure to recognize the political decisions that created middle class prosperity creates two big problems for the country, Walsh argues. First, too many white people think they didn’t have help, that they did everything on their own. Then, predictably, they reject the idea that they got something African Americans and Latinos didn’t get. It makes a kind of sense: If I believe I didn’t get help, how can you say you didn’t get something I don’t even know that I got?
In WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH WHITE PEOPLE?, Walsh traces this deeply disturbing dynamic as it has played out over the last forty years, dividing the country, poisoning its politics, jeopardizing its future, and even dividing her working class Irish Catholic family as well. As the United States becomes a "majority-minority" culture, while the GOP doubles down on racial and cultural appeals to rev up its demographically threatened white base in 2012, Walsh talks about race in honest, unflinching, unfamiliar terms, acknowledging not just Republican but Democratic Party political mistakes, even her own. Her sweeping thesis provides fascinating answers to both important short-term and long-term questions:
*Why have public unions become the prime target for conservative anger?
*Why, with the economy in shambles, have Republicans doubled down on cultural issues like contraception and immigration?
*Do Democrats realize they've lost the loyalty of the white working and middle class while trying to become the party of Wall Street, collaborating with Republicans in privileging the banking sector above all others, and offering little to its victims?
*Will working class whites wake up now that Republicans are blaming their economic troubles on their own moral failures and poor work ethic – much the way the right did with African Americans in the 1960s?
WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH WHITE PEOPLE? even explains why the election of President Obama—originally a moment of unity and healing—seemingly revived racial animus instead of repairing it. After all, if you believe America’s decline comes from government handouts to people who don’t look like you and who didn’t earn them, it’s easy to see a stimulus package created by our first African America president less as necessary change and more as the capstone on four decades of mistakes. The right wing resentment machine has worked hard to depict the president's modest efforts on behalf of the middle class as "reparations" to black people for years of slavery and discrimination, making race-neutral programs like "Obamacare" and even the auto bailout seem a handout to the undeserving – even as struggling white Americans stand to benefit most from the president's policies.
Coming out just in time for the Democratic and Republican Nation Conventions, WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH WHITE PEOPLE? will be the talk of this political season.
[A raised fist to Hunter Wallace at Occidental Dissent.]
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