The GOP is basically the party of white existential fear...

Writing in the Brookings Institution's FixGov blog last week, political scientist Christopher Parker pondered House Republicans' stubborn refusal to back immigration reform, despite support in the Senate and across wide swaths of the conservative commentariat. He surmises that House Republicans are balking because they "represent constituencies haunted by anxiety associated with the perception that they’re 'losing their country' to immigrants from south of the border."

Recent polling backs this up. Significant numbers of conservatives, and white Americans in general, admit to feeling discomfort at the prospect of a non-majority white America. These views are even stronger among Tea Party-aligned conservatives. According to Parker's polling, nearly two-thirds of Tea Party conservatives want to eliminate birthright citizenship, and 82 percent of Tea Partiers say they feel "anxious or fearful" about undocumented immigrants.

And what is the source of this fear? That color may actually be meaningless, and that white, middle-class wealth is nothing more than an accident of historical factors, an anomaly rather than a given. Whiteness is more and more being exposed to them as cultural rather than natural. There is also the growing understanding among many whites that those at the very top of this society are abandoning them.

There was once a need for a white buffer between the few at the top and the rest at the bottom. But that system worked well under the Fordist/industrial/labor union mode of capital. Under the current neoliberal mode, this buffer that formed America's predominantly white middle class (a class that holds about 25 percent of the nation's wealth) is now actually under attack. The median income for whites is in decline. Incarceration rates for whites are increasing. When the anthropologist David Graeber wrote his book The Democracy Project in 2012, it was understood that 1 in 7 Americans were being dogged by a collection agency; in 2014, it is reported to be 1 in 3. So what do the majority of whites do for protection? They run to the very wolves that want to devour them...

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