Conservative White America, you need a new Grand Strategy

Time for a (mostly) non-economics post/rant. Warning: Contains oversimplified history, sketchy data, and sweeping generalizations.

In 1396, an allied force of European crusaders met an equally sized Ottoman Turkish force in battle at Nicopolis, in modern-day Bulgaria. The vanguard of heavily armored European knights bravely charged the Turkish lines, and after being subjected to vicious attrition by archers, sharpened stakes, and trained pikemen, were flanked by the more lightly armored and thus far more agile Turkish cavalry. It was a rout; barely any of the Crusaders escaped. (And this crushing defeat came at the hands of an enemy who was far from the most fearsome of the non-European powers of the day.)

The Battle of Nicopolis was the last gasp of three centuries of European failure on a grand scale. Three hundred years earlier, climbing out of the Dark Ages on the back of a population boom, and loosely united by the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire, Europe entered into a contest with its neighbor, the Islamic civilization of the Middle East. It was a protracted, one-sided beating. Europe's technological stagnation, its weak feudal economy, and its poor political organization led to repeated thrashings at the hands of the Muslims, who were equipped with world-class siege technology, mounted archery, trade-based economies, and more effective military and political organization. Europe fared even worse against the Mongols when they raided in the 1200s. One could be forgiven for thinking that the only reason that Europe escaped Mongol conquest (and, later, the depredations of Timur) was that it was too poor to be worth conquering. In fact, as the historian Ian Morris has noted, Medieval Europe never came close to achieving the wealth of the old Roman days.

But after three centuries of disastrous defeats, and other shocks like the Black Death and the Great Famine, Europe somehow miraculously got its act together. I don't pretend to have any idea why or how this happened, but it did. Autarkic feudal economies were replaced with global trading empires. Literacy spread, and technology and science blossomed. Military strength followed, and by five centuries after the Battle of Nicopolis, the descendants of those brave, dumb, doomed Crusaders had essentially conquered the entire planet, while vaulting the world into a technological and economic explosion that has still not come to an end.

Which just goes to show, with a good model of social organization, even white people can do pretty darn well.

This fact is heavily on my mind as I think about the plight of another group of white people - conservative white Americans. I'm talking about the vast sweep of suburban and exurban whites, many of them working class or middle class, who consistently vote Republican, who hold conservative social values, and who adhere to conservative Christianity. 

It has become increasingly apparent that "[conservative] white racial panic" is the main social force causing gridlock in American politics today. No reasonable person denies this. But when I think about Conservative White America, I am increasingly struck by the sense that this is an entire civilization in crisis. It is under threat not just - as conservatives would claim - from increasing numbers of Hispanic and Asian voters. "Demographic drowning" doesn't begin to describe its problems. Like Medieval Europe before it, Conservative White America is stuck using a social model that just is not working anymore. 

1. First, Conservative White America has failing families. Divorce rates are highest in the "Bible Belt" states where Conservative White America is strongest. While professional whites (who are often liberals) have reversed the trend toward higher divorce, working-class whites are essentially abandoning marriage. While conservatives would claim that this trend is due to the spread of liberal, secular values, the reverse is true; Bible Belters get married more often and earlier than their Northeastern cousins. They just get divorced a lot. Those conservative values are shoving white people, especially working-class white people, into unhappy marriages that cannot last in the modern world. 

2. Next, Conservative White America has failing health. Of course, this is true of all of the United States, and American blacks and Hispanics fare worse than American whites on most health measures. But white Europeans significantly defeat their American cousins on most health outcomes, while Americans pay much more and enjoy much more uncertain access to care. This is due mainly to the success of conservatives in blocking the implementation of universal health care (a case of all America having problems due to CWA policy triumphs). Some small part of it may also have to do with the effect of suburban sprawl and lightly regulated corporate food (loaded with sugar and/or fat) on obesity rates. Additionally, suburban and rural drug use may be rising, even as urban drug use has fallen steadily. And white teens are more likely than black or Hispanic teens to abuse drugs. These trends do not bode well for the health of Red America.

3. Add to that failing economic mobility. Much is made of the economic dynamism of Red states like Texas (well, mainly Texas). But white Americans experience the least economic mobility in the South, the most conservative region. And upward mobility for whites seems to be lowest in regions with heavy sprawl.

4. Conservative White America, like the rest of America, also has failing economic performance. Sure, rich people - who have done pretty well over the past 13 years of stagnating incomes - tend to be conservative. But the vast majority of conservative white voters are not rich, and have seen their incomes fall along with the rest.

5. And to some degree, Conservative White America also has failing social lives. Studies show that suburban residents are less satisfied with their neighborhoods than urban residents, with loneliness and social isolation probably to blame. Other research has shown that urban design has a big influence on social connection. It's just really hard to meet people in the spread-out, isolated non-cities into which conservatives would have us move - and into which much of white America has moved over the past sixty years. Gone are the days of small-town America where everyone knew their neighbors. In the modern suburbs, you are stuck in a box with nobody and nothing.

6. Now finally we get to Conservative White America's failing electoral clout. The poor performance of the GOP cannot, as some hopeful conservatives have claimed, be ascribed to "missing white voters". Whites for whom race defines politics - i.e. most of the current Republican base - have shut themselves out of future political coalitions. They could have followed the example of liberal whites, who allied with minorities, including poorer minorities (blacks, Hispanics) and richer minorities (Asians), and thus will have a big say in shaping America's future policies. Meanwhile, stuck in permanent racial panic mode, all Conservative White America can do is pull their veto levers - the filibuster, etc. - to gum up the machinery of American politics and slow the inevitable.

Each of these points relies on a mix of evidence and personal anecdotal observation. All are to some degree speculative. None is 100% proven. There are counterarguments to each. Maybe good counterarguments. The failure of Conservative White America is not anywhere near as clear as the failure of the Medieval European system was by the time of the Battle of Nicopolis.

But I don't think we should let things get to the Nicopolis level before we reevaluate the Grand Strategy of Conservative White America. Because I want America to succeed, and so I want Conservative White America to succeed. I am not "concern trolling". Seeing rural white American communities spiral into drug use does not give me a shiver of pleasure. Seeing working-class white Republican families disintegrate does not give me a shot of vindictive glee. Seeing white working-class people fat and unhealthy and socially isolated and stuck in dead-end careers out in vast suburban wastelands does not make me smirk and say "I told you so". These things make me sad, and angry, when I see them.

(Nor do I think Liberal White America is without its own problems. I'll discuss these some other times. No group and no social model has it all figured out. But in the past few decades, Liberal White America, especially the urban, educated type of self-identified liberals, seems to have made real headway against the problems of divorce, drugs, and social isolation, and seems to have gradually increased its political clout from the nadir of the Reagan years.)

The reason I'm writing this post (which only a comparatively small number of people will read) is frustration. When I look at the thought leaders of Conservative White America, I see them almost uniformly urging their followers to double down on the old model. To go back to the source, to reaffirm the traditional tactics, to keep charging their horses into the Turkish arrows. And I think that this is very bad advice.

The five big pieces of Conservative White America's Grand Strategy that I think need reevaluation are:

1. "White flight" to suburbs and exurbs

2. Rigid and inflexible "family values" 

3. Hostility toward immigrants and minorities

4. Excessive distrust of the government

5. Distrust of education, science, and intellectualism

I could go through each of these in detail, but I won't. So just a few words on each. The "white flight" thing, though it seems to me to be a dead end, is still a sacred cow of the conservative intelligentsia. Here's Stanley Kurtz writing in the National Review:

[A new HUD regulation] is part of a broader suite of initiatives designed to block suburban development, press Americans into hyper-dense cities, and force us out of our cars. Government-mandated ethnic and racial diversification plays a role in this scheme, yet the broader goal is forced “economic integration.” The ultimate vision is to make all neighborhoods more or less alike, turning traditional cities into ultra-dense Manhattans, while making suburbs look more like cities do now. In this centrally-planned utopia, steadily increasing numbers will live cheek-by-jowl in “stack and pack” high-rises close to public transportation, while automobiles fall into relative disuse.

See? The idea here is that under no circumstances must whites ever countenance themselves to live near nonwhites, and that life in mass exile in tomb-like suburbs is the necessary price of escaping the hellish depredations of diversity. 

As for conservative families, modernity seems to be proving that flexible family values bend, while rigid brittle family values break and result in no families at all. Many East Asian countries and conservative European countries, with their insistence on traditional patriarchal family systems, have seen marriage and fertility rates collapse, while countries like France and Sweden, where women have much more equality and cohabitation is not frowned upon, have maintained healthy fertility. Meanwhile, by delaying marriage and by embracing cohabitation, educated liberal white Americans have made headway in shaping a new, effective kind of family structure more suited to the realities of the modern world. 

Conservative racism, including anti-immigrant nativism, seems unlikely to budge any time soon. But in the past, America was greatly strengthened by the addition of immigrant groups previously considered "nonwhite". This needs to happen again. Conservative white Americans also need to bring Asians and Hispanics into their fold if they are going to win elections going forward; the tooth-and-nail opposition to the Dream Act does not bode well.

I also feel like Conservative White America has shot itself in the foot by assuming that government is always its enemy, and corporations its friend. America's private health care system has not served conservative white Americans well. The amount of fat and sugar consumed on a daily basis by conservative white Americans, turning their bodies to slush, was put into their food by corporations, not by the government. Obviously government is not always good (and personally I think that America's conservative movement provides a needed restraint on government). But the idea that government is always bad, and that its badness is a pillar of conservative faith, should be questioned, for the good of the conservative Americans themselves.

And finally, the contempt for education, science, and intellectualism urged on conservative audiences by many of their media figures seems so purely and obviously self-defeating that it almost doesn't require discussion.

So there are my thoughts on the specifics. Even if my general case is right, my prescriptions could still be wide of the mark.

But I want to mention one more reason why I may seem to be in a bit of a rush to conclude that Conservative White America's strategy is not working. It's because Conservative White America's Grand Strategy looks uncomfortably similar to the approach that served the Europeans so poorly in the Middle Ages. Weak institutions, excessive trust in the Church, low mobility, education only of the elites, persecution of minorities, disdain for science and reason...we've tried this before. And it only led to hundreds of years of poverty, disease, and getting cut down by Turkish archery. One day we woke up and tried something different...and it worked. I say we keep trying something that looks sort of like the thing that worked.