It’s hard to believe that we were ever so innocent, but for a brief moment in the third quarter of last year, Jim Webb was a candidate for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Webb is a decorated veteran, a former Secretary of the Navy, a best-selling author, and a one-term Virginia senator — a model nominee in many ways. But he’s also self-identified redneck, and there just aren’t many of those in the current Democratic national leadership. Fittingly, Webb’s campaign, which lasted from July through October, looked suspiciously like the latest iteration of a years-long effort to berate the party establishment on behalf of poor, white Americans.
Webb summarized his core argument in a 2010 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege”:
Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.
Then, in early 2015, as the gears for his presidential campaign began turning, Webb told Yahoo! News: “This is where Democrats screw up … I think they have kind of unwittingly used this group, white working males, as a whipping post for a lot of their policies. And then when [the white working males] react, they say they’re being racist.”
With a line like that, it’s almost impressive that Webb’s eventual campaign lasted as long as it did. The post-Barack Obama Democratic coalition is largely built on ethnic minorities, women, and young, college-educated white people — to put it mildly, not the target audience for a lecture about how diversity programs create ruinous outcomes for rural white men. Despite his caveats about the special historical suffering of black Americans, Webb’s framing — to say nothing of his wooden, faintly frightening public persona — felt like a holdover from an uglier era of zero-sum racial thinking.
[For more of this story, written by John Lingan, go to https://psmag.com/americas-lon...fc19191f8#.lhqojpjwh]
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