New book finds race dominating politics, but class still matters
Desert Sage column
Algernon D'Ammassa
“Elections can be said to hold up a mirror to a society,” Zoltan Hajnal writes in the introduction to his new book. “The decisions made privately on ballots reflect who we are and provide indications of whether the nation is what it aspires to be.”
Voter choice is a key metric informing “Dangerously Divided,” Hajnal’s look at the influence of race and class divisions in American politics from the voting booth to government.
Reading the book, I wondered whether voter behavior reflects who we are so much as how we think. Our view of ourselves and our country, as reflected in elections, may be distorted.
From a wide-ranging study of election data, Hajnal finds that voters are divided by race more than socioeconomic class, and that the racial divide is getting worse in a nation that is 60 percent white yet elects white people to approximately 90 percent of its elected offices.
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Race is shown to be determinative as to which candidates win elections, which voters win at the polls, and who is on the losing end of policy.
While other dichotomies and tensions exist, race overwhelms them all and to degrees previously unreported. Hajnal also reports that people of color consistently lose more often, and his analysis of subsequent policies shows they are paying for it when it comes to governance.
“Arguably, we are now more divided by race than at any other time in modern American history,” Hajnal writes. “Ironically, as the nation has become more diverse, it has become more divided by the diversity.”
With white people on track to become a minority group while retaining so much power and privilege in society, the widening racial divide looms large and is restructuring American politics to a surprising extent.
Class and race are not mutually exclusive analyses, however, and they are not in competition. They overlap in significant ways and in service to prevailing relationships of power.
The implication of Hajnal’s research is that race — whatever that really is — matters more to voters than their class position, but does this render class irrelevant?
Michael Zweig, author of “The Working Class Majority,” defined classes as “groups of people connected to one another, and made different from one another, by the ways they interact when producing goods and services.”
Class analysis is essentially about power, including the shared interests among those who work and among those profiting from others’ work, as well as the larger structures of corporate power and concentrated wealth.
Racial division has a social function. White supremacy served as justification for settler colonialism, slavery and for the Jim Crow system of racial segregation that followed the formal abolition of human bondage.
Hajnal includes the modern history of how our two dominant parties honed their messages and strategies about race and immigration, but it is also necessary to acknowledge the class interests defended by Republicans and Democrats alike. Many laws and policies that distribute wealth upward in society are the products of bipartisan consensus.
A substantial chunk of the book argues that where Democrats hold majorities, legislatures spend more on health, education and other areas to heal gaps in the well-being of non-whites.
All well and good, but voters need to know, and analysts need to point out that those gaps exist within a political context.
It is hard to scrutinize bipartisan class politics if we are trained not to observe them. The same must be said of the inherent tensions between capitalism and democracy.
Dangerously divided: How race and class shape winning and losing in American politics, by Zoltan L. Hajnal. Cambridge University Press, 370 pages, $27.95 (softcover).
Desert Sage enjoys hearing from readers at adammassa@lcsun-news.com. Find him on Twitter at @AlgernonWrites.
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