An American Whitopia would be a dystopia

In a recent essay about the racial politics of the Trump movement, Ta-Nehisi Coates concluded with a warning:

It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W. E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was “singularly disastrous for modern civilization” or James Baldwin claims that whites “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white,” the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump.

Yes, at first glance, the notion that Trumpian white racial nationalism is a threat to the whole world, or the downfall of civilization, etc. seems a bit of an exaggeration. Barring global thermonuclear war, Trump and his successors aren't going to bring down human civilization - the U.S. is powerful and important, but it isn't nearly that powerful or important.

But there's an important truth here. An America defined by white racial nationalism - an American Whitopia - would be an economic and cultural disaster movie. It would be a dysfunctional, crappy civilization, sinking into the fetid morass of its own decay. Some people think that an American Whitopia would be bad for people of color but ultimately good for whites, but this is dead wrong. Although nonwhite Americans would certainly suffer greatly, white American suffering under the dystopia of a Trumpist society would be dire and unending. 

Here is a glimpse of that dark future, and an explanation of why it would fail so badly.

Don't think Japan. Think Ukraine.

First, a simple observation: Racial homogeneity is no guarantee of wealth. Don't believe me? Just look at a night photo of North Korea and South Korea:

The red arrow and white outline point to North Korea. It's completely pitch dark at night because it's poor as hell. People starve there. But it's every bit as ethnically pure and homogeneous as its neighbor South Korea - in fact, it's the same race of people. North Korea, in fact, puts a ton of cultural emphasis on racial homogeneity. But that doesn't save their society from being a dysfunctional hellhole.

OK, so North and South Korea are an experiment. They prove that institutions matter - that a homogeneous society can either be rich and happy or poor and hellish, depending on how well it's run.

It's not just East Asia we're talking about, either. It's incredibly easy to find deeply dysfunctional white homogeneous countries. Ukraine, for instance. Ukraine's per capita GDP is around $8,300 at purchasing power parity. That's less than 1/6 of America's. It's also a deeply dysfunctional society, with lots of drug use and suicide and all of that stuff, and has been so since long before the Donbass War started. 

It's worth noting that Ukraine also has an economy largely based on heavy industry and agriculture - just the kind of economy Trump wants to go back to. So being a homogeneous all-white country with plenty of heavy industry and lots of rich farmland hasn't saved Ukraine from being a dysfunctional, decaying civilization. 

Alt-righters explicitly call for America to be a white racial nation-state. Some cite Japan as an example of a successful ethnostate. Japan is great, there's no denying it. But I know Japan, and let me assure you, an American Whitopia would not be able to be Japan. It definitely wouldn't be Sweden or Denmark or Finland. It couldn't even be Hungary or Czech or Poland. It would probably end up more like Ukraine. 

Here's why.

Where are your smart people?

Modern economies have always depended on smart people, but the modern American economy depends on them even more than others and even more than in the past. The shift of industrial production chains to China has made America more dependent on knowledge-based industries - software, pharmaceuticals, advanced manufacturing, research and design, business services, etc. Even the energy industry is a high-tech, knowledge-based industry these days. Take away those industries, and America will be left trying to compete with China in steel part manufacturing. How's that working out for Ukraine?

If you want to understand how important knowledge-based industries are, just read Enrico Moretti's book, "The New Geography of Jobs". Cities and towns with lots of human capital - read, smart folks - are flourishing, while old-line manufacturing towns are decaying and dying. Trump has sold people a fantasy that his own blustering bullshit can reverse that trend, but if you really believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.

So here's the thing: Smart Americans have no desire to live in a Whitopia. First, let's just look at smart white people. Among white Americans with a postgraduate degree, Clinton beat Trump in 2016 by a 13-point margin, even though Trump won whites overall by a 22 point margin. Overall, education was the strongest predictor of which white people voted for Trump and which went for Clinton. Also note that close to 2/3 of the U.S.' GDP is produced in counties that voted for Clinton. 

Richard Florida has been following smart Americans around for a long time, and he has repeatedly noted how they like to live in diverse places. Turn America into an ethnostate, and the smart white people will bolt for Canada, Australia, Japan, or wherever else isn't a racist hellhole.

Now look beyond white people. A huge amount of the talent that sustains America's key industries comes from Asia. An increasing amount also comes from Africa and the Middle East, though Asia is still key. Our best science students are mostly immigrants. Our grad students are mostly immigrants. Our best tech entrepreneurs are about half immigrantshttps://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2016/03/17/study-immigrants-founded-51-of-u-s-billion-dollar-startups/. You make America into Whitopia, and those people are gone gone gone.

I'm not saying every single smart American would leave an American white ethnostate. But most would, and many of those who remain wouldn't be happy. 

There's a clear precedent for this: Nazi Germany. Hitler's persecution of Jews made Jewish scientists leave. But it also prompted an exodus of non-Jewish scientists who weren't Jewish but who didn't like seeing their Jewish colleagues, friends, and spouses get persecuted - Erwin Schroedinger, for example, and Enrico Fermi. This resulted in a bonanza of talent for America, and it starved Nazi Germany of critical expertise in World War 2. Guess who built the atom bomb? 

How you get there matters

There are just about 197 million non-Hispanic white people in the United States. But the total population of the country is 323 million. That means that around 126 million Americans are nonwhite. Among young Americans, nonwhites make up an even larger percentage. 

To turn America into a white racial nation-state - into Whitopia - would require some combination of four things:

1. Genocide

2. Ethnic cleaning (expulsion of nonwhites)

3. Denial of legal rights to nonwhites

4. Partition of the country

To see how these would go, look to historical examples. 

Genocide is usually done against a group that's a small minority, like Armenians or Jews. Larger-scale genocides are occasionally attempted - for example, Hitler's plan to wipe out the bulk of the Slavs, or the general mass murder of 25% of the population in Pol Pot's Cambodia. These latter attempts at mega-genocide killed a lot of people (Hitler slaughtered 25 million Slavs or so), but eventually they failed, with disastrous consequences for both the people who engineered them and the countries that acquiesced to the policies.

Denial of legal rights to minorities also has a poor record of effectiveness. The Southern slavery regime in the U.S., the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the Jim Crow system in the U.S. all ended up collapsing under the weight of moral condemnation, economic inefficiency, and war. 

Ethnic cleansing and partition have somewhat less disastrous records - see India/Pakistan, or Israel/Palestine, or maybe the Iraqi Civil War that largely separated Sunni and Shia. But "less disastrous" doesn't mean "fine". Yes, India and Pakistan and Israel survived intact. But those bloody campaigns of separation and expulsion left scars that still haven't healed. The cost of Israeli partition was an endless conflict and a garrison state. The cost of Indian partition was a series of wars and an ongoing nuclear standoff, not to mention terrorism in both India and Pakistan. 

In America, a partition would lead to a long bloody war. Remember, 39% of whites voted for Hillary Clinton. And the 29% of Asians and Hispanics who voted for Trump are unlikely to express similar support for a policy that boots them out of their country or town. Furthermore, nonwhite Americans are not confined to a single region that could be spun off into a new country, but concentrated in cities all over the nation. Thus, any partition would involve a rearrangement of population on a scale unprecendented in modern history. That rearrangement would inevitably be violent - a civil war on a titanic scale. 

That war would leave lots of bitterness and social division in its wake. It would leave bad institutions in place for many decades. It would elevate the worst people in the country - the people willing to do the dirty deeds of ethnic cleansing. In an earlier post about homogeneity vs. diversity, I wrote about how a white ethnostate created byan exodus of whites from America or Europe would probably be populated by the most fractious, violent, division-prone subset of white people. A white ethnostate created by a titanic civil war and mass ethnic cleansing would be run by an even worse subset.

This is why a partition or ethnic cleansing of America would lead to lower social trust, bad institutions, a violent society, and a kakistocracy. In other words, a recipe for a country that looks more like Ukraine (or even North Korea) than it does like Japan. 

It's already happening

This isn't just theoretical, and it isn't just based on historical analogies either. There are already the first signs of dysfunction and dystopia in the new America that Trump, Bannon, Sessions, Miller, and others are working to create. 

First of all, the places that voted for Trump are not doing so well economically or socially. Not only do Trump counties represent only about a third of the nation's GDP, but they also tend to be suffering disproportionately from the opiate epidemic. States that shifted most strongly toward Trump from 2012 to 2016, like Ohio, tend to be Rust Belt states with low levels of education, low immigration, and low percentages of Asians and Hispanics. Imagine all the things that make Ohio slightly worse off than Texas or California or New York or Illinois, then multiply those things by 1000 - and take away all the good economic stuff in Ohio, like the diverse urban revival in Columbus - to see what a Trumpian Whitopia would look like. 

Second, Trump is already creating a kakistocracy. His administration, of course, is scandal-ridden and corrupt. His allies are the likes of Joe Arpaio, who is reported to have tortured undocumented immigrants. His regime has emboldened murderous Nazi types to march in the street, and his condemnation of those Nazis has been rather equivocal. 

That episode caused business leaders - some of the smartest, most capable Americans - to abandon the Trump administration. If even business leaders - who are mostly rich white men - abandon an administration with even a whiff of white nationalism, imagine who would be in charge in a Whitopia. It would not be the Tim Cooks and Larry Pages and Elon Musks of the world. It would be far less competent people. 

So already we're seeing the first few glimmerings of a dystopian Whitopia. We're still a long way off, of course - things could get a million times worse. But the Trump movement gives us a glimpse of what that path would look like, and it ain't pretty. 

Whitopia: a self-inflicted disaster of epic proportions

Refashioning America as a white ethnostate would be a self-inflicted catastrophe of epic, unprecedented proportions. It would drive America from the top rank of nations to the middle ranks. It would involve lots of pain and death and violence for everyone, but the white Americans stuck in Whitopia would suffer the longest. Nonwhite Americans would move away and become refugees, or die in the civil wars. But the ones who survived would escape the madness and begin new lives elsewhere, in more sane functional countries. 

Meanwhile, white Americans and their descendants would be trapped in the decaying corpse of a once-great civilization. A manufacturing-based economy making stuff no one else wanted to buy, bereft of the knowledge industries and vibrant diverse cities that had made it rich. A violent society suffering long-lasting PTSD from a terrible time of war and atrocity. A divided society, with simmering resentment underneath the surface, like Spain under Franco. A corrupt, thuggish leadership, with institutions that keep corrupt, thuggish leaders in power. 

This is what it would take to turn America from a diverse, polyracial nation into a white ethnostate. That is the price that white Americans, and their children, and their children's children would pay. 

It's not worth it.