When imaginary social justice policies destroy working class prospects

Born in America of deep rooted American heritage, I grew up overseas owing to my father's career.  I returned to get acclimated into the American education system when I was sixteen.

Reentry was a little rough.  The stories of my parents growing up in Oklahoma from the 1930s to 1950s were a poor guide to the startling experience of late 1970s New Jersey prep school.  

One of the things that struck me the most in the US, was the American inclination to mistakenly elide class issues with race issues.  Problems which in Europe were entirely discussed in class terms were in the US treated as if they were race issues.

From a political and advocacy point of view there are all sorts of benefits for insiders treating class issues as race issues, as is still being done to an even greater extent than in the 1970s.

The problem is that when you misdiagnose the root causes, you end up with ineffective solutions.  As has been manifested over the past fifty years.  For many class issues, the solution resides in pro-growth economic policies.  Instead, the deep state bureaucracies, academia, mainstream media and the rest of the Mandarin class have monomaniacally focused on restitutional policies favoring different racial groups in different fashions, reinforcing racial barriers rather than removing them.  

For the economically secure Mandarin Class this is self-pleasing kabuki moral theater even though it has been generally disastrous for those in the working class and below.  

Joel Kotkin has a new essay which captures many of these issues with a substructure of empirical evidence.  From Woke Politics are a Disaster for Minorities by Joel Kotkin.  

But what about the vast majority of African Americans and Latinos? Even in the best of times, back in February, our economy was failing many of these minorities, as well working people in general. Corporate mea culpas about racism and solidarity with BLM may blunt criticism, but assertions of guilt don’t address the fundamental problem of diminished expectations, particularly in minority and working-class communities that continue to suffer economic distress and hopelessness. Minorities make up over 40% of the nation’s working class and will constitute the majority by 2032.

[snip]

The elitist vision of minority outlook was epitomized by the Obama Administration, where African Americans and other “people of color” enjoyed enormous influence and access while the conditions for middle- and working-class minorities generally declined. Minorities with elite degrees flourished, but policies that protected banks and targeted homeowners wiped out much black and Hispanic wealth. “The first black president in American history,” notes the widely-read Marxist blog Jacobin, “ turned out to be a disaster for black wealth.”

Just as traditional liberalism has stopped benefitting the majority of workers, the new progressive version seems likely to fail even more spectacularly. A Biden Administration may coo more and say the “right” things, but it is unlikely to replicate the remarkable success, pre-COVID, of the Trump years, where minority unemployment hit record lows and the incomes of the least grew faster, for the first time in decades, than those of the upper classes. Indeed in a host of areas—starting with energy policy—the Administration embraces blue state priorities that often work against minority uplift and leave most abandoned on the edges of our society. 

 [snip]

For all that President Biden’s inspiring talk of unity represents a necessary salve after the often-excessive divisiveness of Trump, the new Administration’s focus on “systemic racism” simply nationalizes the race-based politics common in those areas, like California and New York, that now have control of the federal apparat. These policies—from affirmative action to Maoist “struggle sessions” reborn in corporate seminars—have catapulted minorities into important-seeming jobs but have brought little actual progress to most in minority communities. As the activists and their corporate sponsors preen over “defunding police,” it is predominately minority communities who face the greatest threat from renewed levels of violent crime in cities such as New York. 

But, as demonstrated in a recent report for the Urban Reform Institute, generally speaking minorities have done much better—in terms of income and homeownership—in deep red states and regions than in the more “enlightened” blue regions. In fact, among larger metropolitan areas such as Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, the median African-American income, adjusted for costs, is more than $60,000—compared to $36,000 in San Francisco and $37,000 in Los Angeles. The median income for Latinos in Virginia Beach-Norfolk is $69,000, compared to $43,000 in Los Angeles, $47,000 in San Francisco, and $40,000 in New York. 

One critical measure can be seen in homeownership. Property remains key to financial security: Homes today account for roughly two thirds of the wealth of middle-income Americans. Homeowners have a median net worth more than 40 times that of renters, according to the Census Bureau. Yet in some parts of the country, notably California and the Northeast, housing prices are often out of reach for most minorities. Black home ownership in areas like Atlanta and Oklahoma City borders on 50%, compared to one third in Los Angeles, Boston, or New York. Among Hispanics, Pittsburgh, Akron, and St. Louis stand out while the least affordable housing markets include the four large California metros, Honolulu, and Boston. 

The lower quintiles of the class system consistently suffer great negative consequences from policies rooted in the notions of restitutional justice promulgated by the cocooned and privileged Mandarin Class.  The hallucinations of the moral preening establishment wings of both parties will continue to make things worse, more divisive, and more dangerous so long as they pander to elite ideologies such as social justice and ignore the hard work of economic growth which is the elixir of class progression.