If you listen to the commentators and activists of the political Left then it’s easy to get the impression that the United States of America is hopelessly divided by race. But even if you take into account that America had slavery for much longer than the United Kingdom did and discriminatory ‘Jim Crow’ laws are within living memory, the real picture, not the one that the Left paint, may be very different.
There’s a really interesting article over at Reason magazine that looks at the attitudes to race and politics of Americans and the results look promising with regards race but less so when it comes to politics. Reason quotes various surveys that show that Americans are considerably less bothered by things like interracial marriage or living in an interracial area than then once were. However where there are divides, big ones, is over politics.
The Reason article author JD Tuccile said:
“In most societies racial and ethnic divisions are not seen as the most salient cleavage,” Pew observes. “In the U.S. and South Korea, 90% say there are at least strong conflicts between those who support different parties – including around half or more in each country who say these conflicts are very strong.”
Americans overwhelmingly approve of interracial marriage, but don’t feel the same about crossing partisan boundaries.
Interracial relationships were once a no no in America and racialism was so ingrained in their society that when US service personnel came over to the UK in World War II, their soldiers had to be told that it was not a problem and not unusual for Black and White service personnel to drink together in pubs. The fact that division between races is so much less of a problem than it once was should be seen as a moral and practical victory for the Civil Rights Movement and also for American society.
No society is perfect, all societies have their arseholes, all societies will contain those who hate others because of the colour of their skin. But America, despite the divisions of the past, is now less divided over the issue of race than it ever was.
It’s good in my view that less Americans give a toss about the colour of their neighbour’s or choice of partner’s skin, but I find myself a bit worried about the political division. The two political sides are siloising with fewer blue collar working class Democrats than there once was as these voters have moved to the Republicans and we now have steep divides between Left and Right, with the Democrats shifting more towards the more socialist pole and Republicans towards the more nationalistic pole. This bodes ill for cooperation between the sides when cooperation is needed. America might be going the way of the UK where the traditional party of the working class, Labour, now mainly represents the academic and middle class Left leaving no other outlet for working class voters than the Tories who also don’t fully represent the interests of the working classes as can be shown by their willingness to virtue signal over climate issues even if that virtue signalling might harm the working classes.
