Caste and Class in American Politics

A Masterful Work

Isabel Wilkerson’s recent book Caste is a masterful exploration of the meaning and ubiquity of caste divisions in American society. The author’s comparisons of our caste system with those of India and Nazi Germany are telling and accurate. Her descriptions of the horrors that have been visited on members of her caste are harrowing, and her recounting of her own experiences in pushing the boundaries of caste are authoritative in the way that only first-person experiences can be.

An Incomplete View of the Role of Caste

However, her discussion of the role of caste in American politics is incomplete because it fails to take account of the role of money and of the people who provide it. In Wilkerson’s view, issues of caste are the main drivers of political divisions in American politics. She sees the contemporary Republican Party as driven by the status anxiety of the members of the dominant caste. Speaking of the presidential campaign of 2016, she says (p. 6)

The campaign had become … an existential fight for primacy in a country whose demographics had been shifting beneath us all. People whose … ancestry traced back to Europe had been the dominant racial caste in an unspoken hierarchy since before the beginning of the republic. But …, in the summer of 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau announced its projection that by 2042, … whites would no longer be the majority ….

Then, that fall … an African-American … was elected president of the United States.

The effect of all this was to produce anger and anxiety among working class white people. As Wilkerson puts it (p. 183),

If a lower-caste person manages actually to rise above an upper-caste person, the natural human response from someone weaned on their caste’s inherent superiority is to perceive a threat to their existence, a heightened sense of unease, of displacement, of fear for their very survival. “If the things that I have believed are not true, then might I not be who I thought I was?” The disaffection is more than economic. The malaise is spiritual, psychological, emotional. Who are you if there is no one to be better than?

For Wilkerson, this spiritual malaise and insecurity accounts for the strength of working-class support for Donald Trump in 2016 and for the victory of the Republican Party that year. She is correct as far as she goes, but her explanation is incomplete because it fails to account for the financial cost of turning widespread malaise and insecurity into a political movement.

It Takes Money and the Support of People Who Have It

The rallies that Trump held during his campaign had to be paid for. The propaganda that links “welfare” to the "laziness" of black people has to be paid for. The propaganda telling us that Mexican immigrants are gangsters and rapists has to be paid for. The people who spread racist propaganda on Fox News and talk radio earn six-figure salaries, and they have to be paid. 

The money for these things comes from people at the top of our society. The Koch brothers’ political action committee has contributed millions of dollars to Republican political campaigns, and the Kochs along with other wealthy people and corporations have also made large donations to the American Legislative Exchange Council. Betsy DeVos’s family has made millions of dollars of contributions to Republican political campaigns. Their contributions and the contributions of others like them supported the effort to build a movement based on racist fears. Why do people like these donate money to support such a movement?

Why Rich People Support Racist Politics

They don’t do it because of status anxiety. It is ludicrous to say that the likes of Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos or Rupert Murdoch act politically because they are suffering from status anxiety. Great wealth always confers high social status in the United States. Rich people are admired for their wealth. Our white billionaires are not threatened by the election of Barack Obama as president or by the fact that Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry are also billionaires. So, why do American billionaires support racist politics?

The short answer is that they do it to keep wages low, taxes low, the working class docile and government safely in the hands of people like themselves. They do it to divide the working class and thereby keep its members from joining together to act in their own interest.

Class and Caste in India and Nazi Germany

This was true in the past as it is today. Let us look at the cases that Wilkerson uses for comparison to our caste system. She mentions the Indian caste system. In Indian villages, the major landowners belong to the higher castes, while the tenant farmers and landless laborers are lower caste people and Dalits. Thus, the caste system bolsters the control that the wealthy exercise over the lives of the poor. It prevents the Shudras (members of the lowest caste) from allying with the Dalits (untouchables). The system provides divine legitimation for an oppressive class system.

Wilkerson also compares our system to that of Nazi Germany. In understanding the rise of the Nazi Party, we should remember that in the early nineteen thirties, the German capitalists were desperately afraid of communism. A successful communist revolution had taken place just next door in Russia only a few years earlier, and the German communist party was large and well organized. German capitalists supported Hitler and the Nazis as a bulwark against communism. For the wealthy, the Nazi caste system was a price they were willing to pay to maintain their wealth and power.

Caste and Class in American Politics

The same kinds of motives underlie upper class support of racist politics in American History. In the late nineteenth century, the planter class in the South promoted racial divisions not only to keep black people in line but also to prevent poor black and white people from joining together in the populist movement of that period. The restrictions on voting that were put in place eliminated millions of poor white voters along with the black voters, and the planters maintained their control in a region where they were a small minority of the total, white population.

Racial divisions in the United States have also been exploited to break strikes and to prevent the development of labor unions in many parts of our country, and racial divisions continue to be used that way today.

People like Robert Koch, Betsy DeVos or Rupert Murdoch exploit the racial fears of the working class in order to maintain their own wealth and power. They support racist politics to bring in votes for candidates who will pass right-to-work laws, oppose higher taxes, prevent environmental regulation and prevent the creation of a decent national health care system. They support racist politics not because they are worried about their caste positions but to advance their economic agendas. Rupert Murdoch has even turned supporting racist politics into a profitable business in Fox News.

We can see the outcome of this kind of cynical politics in the legislative actions of the Trump administration. It did very little to advance a racist agenda, but it succeeded in passing an enormous tax cut that benefits mainly rich people, and it rolled back many environmental regulations. The administration also succeeded in appointing judges who will limit voting rights in order to maintain the power of the rich. Above all, the racist politics of the Republican Party kept the members of the working class from getting together to advance their shared interests.

Isabel Wilkerson is right when she says that caste plays a huge role in American politics, but the Republican political movement based on caste did not spring spontaneously from the soil of American culture and history.  It cannot be explained solely as an expression of the American caste system. The movement was created and nurtured deliberately and cynically to split the working class and to prevent the emergence of a strong, working class political movement dedicated to improving life for all Americans and not just for the wealthy few.