Why America Is Going Backwards in Terms of Race, and Why This Is Probably Going To Turn Itself Around

There are dozens of different conjectures as to the cause of this retrograde era in the U.S. where white people seem to be doing things as despicable as anything they had done in the past.

To be sure, there’s nothing new about racial hatred and violence in this country; in fact, it could be argued that the exploitation of people of color is the actual brick and mortar, the real substance on which the American Empire was built: the work of 10.7 million slaves working over a 350-year period, the theft of 66% of the total square miles of the modern contiguous U.S. (3 million square miles) from the Native Americans and the accompanying genocide of indigenous people, Jim Crow laws, ill-treatment of sharecroppers and wage theft, all followed by segregation and discrimination in housing (and thus education).

Having said this, it appeared that this was going the right way until just the past few years.  We didn’t see the vehicular homicides, along with the torches and racial slurs parading through our streets until late 2016.

So how did we let progress stop and allow this reversion back into hateful abusive ethos of the past? I’m with the people who believe the following:

From the end of World War II until about 1980, the white working/middle class prospered nicely.  Over time, people were able to afford nicer cars, bigger houses, and better education for their children, and they held the rational belief that these children would have even better lives than they, their parents, had had before them.  This improving quality of life meant relatively little anger and frustration.  If people of different races and religions were doing OK as well, that didn’t cause too much heartburn for anyone but the most twisted elements of white society, i.e., the KKK and the neo-Nazis, whose numbers were tiny and whose ostracism from mainstream culture was virtually complete.

But then all this stopped.  The last 40 years has been defined by wealth transfer to the super-rich along with stagnating wages for the working class.  In 1980, the average corporate CEO was paid 35 times the salary of the workers; now it’s about 280 times.  The percentage of all U.S. wealth owned by the top 0.01% more than doubled between 1995 and 2015.

Not unlike what Germany experienced between the First and Second World Wars, the average citizen had become increasingly frustrated.  Now, along came a demagogue who saw an enormous opportunity and seized on it, convincing this angry hoard that their miseries are due to Latino immigrants, blacks, Jews, and Muslims.

I’m not saying that we’re going full Nazi, even though the parallel to Germany a century ago is striking so far; in fact, it’s identical except for the fact that our concentration camps don’t have gas chambers.

In fact, we’re definitely not going full Nazi, and here’s why: rich white people are starting to understand that Trump and his rabble are ruining this country.  This became clear to my wife and me when we celebrated the New Year  with a friend of mine from the age of five.  Here’s an extremely intelligent, well educated guy who runs a hedge fund with $400 million under management, who was a vigorous Trump supporter until recently, complete with signs on his front lawn in the fall of 2016.

Three years later, he’s an active supporter of the Michael Bloomberg campaign, a “MIKE 2020” bumper sticker adorning the back of his Mercedes Benz.

Now let’s ask why, given that my friend received an enormous windfall via tax cuts for billionaires and preferred treatment of hedge fund managers, where carried interest is taxed at capital gains rates.  He skirted around a full explanation, and I didn’t think it was right to push him, especially in his own home, but it was easy to take his words (like “he’s too divisive”) and read between the lines:  Escalating hate crime is a huge embarrassment to our nation.

But that’s just the start: Trump’s criminality and trampling across the balance of powers is savaging the Constitution. His trade wars, based on a subject he knows nothing about, are whipsawing the stock and bond markets, and will inflict heavy damage if not ended swiftly, which will require a level of sanity and even temperament at the bargaining table that is entirely lacking here. The ever-heightening probability of war in several regions of the globe has the whole planet on edge.  The crimes against humanity that are occurring at the southern border and dozens of other less visible atrocities have pushed the United States to the point that it is despised in most parts of the world, and regarded as a sick joke in the rest.

My friend travels the world, connected to an enormous number of people associated with Wall Street and the global financial markets in dozens of different capacities, and thus it appears that, at least at some level, Trump is losing support of the rich.  They see that all this is building a nation even they, at the very top of the food chain, will not want to live in, and it looks like they’re making the change accordingly.  If any significant portion of this comes to pass, he’s toast.