The term “whiteness” is a shorthand for many of the vices that energize “conservatism.”
It stands for the privileges—unrecognized by “conservatives”—that white people have always enjoyed in America because of their race. Privileges like exemption from being enslaved, exemption from police harassment, unrestricted freedom to live, work, and travel, the access to higher-paying jobs and better education.
It also stands for the attitude of people who demand these privileges without regard for those who don’t have them. These are mostly entitled white people. But there are also more than a few non-white people who have bought into the whiteness mindset. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina comes to mind, as does Vivek Ramaswamy. It is not an accident that both of them are businessmen who prefer the “conservative” myth of the self-made man to the truth that no one succeeds without help from someone and without a government that sets the ground rules and enforces fairness.
Whiteness, “conservatism,” and guilt
The current epidemic of whiteness was triggered by the election of Barack Obama in 2008. The Tea Party of the early 2010s was the “conservative” response to a black man as president. In the world of whiteness, a non-white should never have all the privileges of white people, let alone “rule” over whites. Then, of course, came Trump to catalyze the infection into a political pandemic.
Now, the entire Republican party has pretty much become the modern version of the KKK. The cruelty of Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’s Greg Abbott toward all marginalized people—immigrants, minorities, women, LGBTQ+ people, educators, unionists—is cutting edge Republican whiteness. “Conservatives” love the Trumps, the Tubervilles, the Jorndans, the Gaetzes, the Greenes, the Boberts not despite their ignorance and viciousness but because of it.
This modern whiteness is in fact a love of injustice. It derives, like all “conservative” depravity, from fear of loss—in this case the simpleminded fear of scarcity. If non-whites get some of the pie, there won't be any pie left for whites. Zero-sum thinking is characteristic of ignorant and uncreative people. And those two qualities are all over “conservatism.”
But whiteness deepens the ignorant fear of loss, intensifies it into a fear of justice. “Conservatives” feel, even if they don't recognize it consciously, that if they got what they deserved, if they were judged properly for their selfishness, if they received justice, it would go very harshly with them.
Hence the backlash we are living through. The book-banning, the “don’t-say-gay” laws, the bans on abortion and women’s reproductive rights, the rampant free-guns-for-all-white-people” laws, the incessant “what-about-ism”—it’s all in the service of convincing themselves that the guilt they feel does not come from their own debased character, but from some external source.
It is the response of the guilty denying their guilt loudly, aggressively, even violently. It lets them shift the blame away from themselves. But it doesn’t make them less guilty. Indeed, it makes them more guilty. Their fear and hatred of justice makes them even more unjust to others, blaming others for their own faults.
Hared of justice an antisocial and unconstitutional character virus
Fearing and hating justice as they do, “conservatives” infected with the whiteness virus fail the most basic qualification for citizenship.
According to James Madison, “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” (Federalist 51.) One of the purposes of the Constitution, recognized in the Preamble, is “to establish Justice.” Hence, those who fear and hate justice stand outside the ambit of the Constitution. They are citizens in name only, by the mere fact that they reside within the geographic boundaries of the nation. But their character flouts the Constitution’s establishment of justice. They are thoroughly un-American.
The attempt to preserve unjust privileges is unconstitutional. The attempt to prevent others from receiving equal and just rights is unconstitutional. And the attempt—which “conservatives” have made a specialty in the past half-century—to twist and pervert the laws to paint whiteness as a right under the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, or the Tenth Amendment is also unconstitutional.
All of it is unconstitutional not for any technical reason, but because it is inherently unjust, and justice is the end of government. None of the provisions of the Constitution or its Amendments can possibly be interpreted as a right to be selfish. Government cannot stand on such a principle. And without government, there is no freedom, no protection, and no justice.
“Conservatism” the bastion of whiteness
Today’s Republican party and the “conservatism” it espouses is virulent whiteness reaching fever pitch. The outbreak of the Tea Party and the further incitement by Trump it not something new among “conservatives.”
As an expression of racism, ignorance, and selfishness, whiteness has been a “conservative” character trait since the Anti-federalists tried to scuttle the Constitution. It fueled the “conservative” South during its crusade to save slavery and, after the Civil War, during its Jim Crow crusade to fight post-slavery equal rights. And today it continues to fuel the cruelty-loving “conservatives” who can no longer tolerate the onward march of civil rights since the 1960s.
But what makes whiteness especially destructive is its alliance with the nearly infinite greed of ruthless capitalists. It is the money of the plutocrats that finances the exorbitant advertising campaigns that keep “conservatism”—an obviously inhumane, self-centered, aggressive, short-sighted, and stupid meanness—politically alive.
This funding for whiteness goes back to the profoundly un-American economist James McGill Buchanan (1919-2013). Here is a summary of his “thinking” about government from an article in the Guardian.
He argued that a society could not be considered free unless every citizen has the right to veto its decisions. What he meant by this was that no one should be taxed against their will. But the rich were being exploited by people who use their votes to demand money that others have earned, through involuntary taxes to support public spending and welfare. Allowing workers to form trade unions and imposing graduated income taxes were forms of “differential or discriminatory legislation” against the owners of capital.
Any clash between “freedom” (allowing the rich to do as they wish) and democracy should be resolved in favour of freedom. In his book The Limits of Liberty, he noted that “despotism may be the only organisational alternative to the political structure that we observe.” Despotism in defence of freedom.
His prescription was a “constitutional revolution”: creating irrevocable restraints to limit democratic choice. Sponsored throughout his working life by wealthy foundations, billionaires and corporations, he developed a theoretical account of what this constitutional revolution would look like, and a strategy for implementing it.
I won’t even go into how degenerate all this is. It is completely opposed to the spirit of the Constitution in every particular, so much so that Buchanan himself called for the Constitution to be overhauled.
And the ruthless capitalists of America, all the way from the Koch brothers down to the sleazy Republican shyster in your home town, have been funding this strategy for decades.
What we are seeing today in the epidemic of whiteness is the final showdown between the Constitution and the plutocrats that want it gone. The Republican party is the instrument of the plutocrats, who use the degenerate character of “conservatives” to rally orc-like troops to prosecute the war.
“Conservatism” is nothing but a stew of racism, ignorance, selfishness, and greed.
The destiny of Decent America
The resurgence of whiteness as the dominant political motivation for Republicans is just the latest outbreak of a weed whose seed roots deep within the “conservative” soul. It sprouts from “conservative” fear, feeds on injustice, and blossoms into self-satisfied racism, arrogant ignorance, intransigent selfishness, and unlimited greed.
Decent America's destiny is to kill “conservatism”—or die trying.
My new book is all about the character virus at the core of “conservatism.”