World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [98]
Actually, they have everything to do with us. Or so this final part of the book will argue.
The next four chapters will show that the explosive confrontation between a market-dominant minority and an aroused ethnonationalist majority is by no means limited to the non-Western world. On the contrary, this confrontation lurks beneath some of the most violent, abominable episodes of Western history. Moreover, even today this explosive dynamic is not confined to individual developing countries. It is being played out at regional and global levels in ways that directly affect the Western nations, particularly the United States.
CHAPTER 9
The Underside of
Western Free Market Democracy
From Jim Crow to the Holocaust
Do market-dominant minorities exist in the United States or Canada or Western Europe? The answer is: not today, at least not at the national level.
Take the United States. While some ethnic minorities have outperformed others, the United States economy is absolutely not controlled by any ethnic minority. On the contrary, if any group can be said to dominate our economy, it is the “white” majority. Generally speaking, Caucasians dominate every major economic sector: finance, technology, real estate, professions, corporate ownership and leadership, and so on. The ten richest Americans in 2001—Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer; Oracle’s Lawrence Ellison; Warren Buffett; and five members of the Wal-Mart-founding Walton family
1 —are all white. (Incidentally, if Jewish-Americans are viewed as an ethnic minority in the United States, they do not remotely dominate the U.S. economy; unlike in Russia, for example, only one or at most two of the ten wealthiest Americans are Jewish.)
Of course, there is a good deal of artificiality in referring to “whites” as an ethnic group in the United States. Italian-Americans, for example, are counted as “whites” for census purposes, while Hispanic-Americans are treated as a separate ethnic group. Nonetheless, the core ethnic problem in the United States, as experienced by ordinary Americans, is one that pits an economically and politically dominant “white” majority against economically and politically weaker ethnic minorities.
The same is true in all the industrialized Western nations. In the West we grapple daily with the problem of economically underprivileged ethnic minorities—blacks and Hispanics in the United States, African immigrants in France, aborigines in Australia, Maori in New Zealand, and so on. In stark contrast, the non-Western world today tends to be characterized by just the opposite dynamic: the presence, in country after country, of a tiny but economically powerful market-dominant ethnic minority.
The problems of ethnic conflict in the Western world today are therefore strikingly different from those outside the West, with very different implications for free market democracy. In the developing world, markets tend to enrich ethnic minorities, while democracy tends to empower poor, “indigenous” majorities, creating a highly combustible dynamic. By contrast, in the contemporary Western nations both markets and democracy tend to reinforce the economic dominance of a perceived ethnic majority.
The Inherent Tension between Markets and Democracy
A closer look, however, reveals that the West is not free from the core dynamic—the confrontation between market wealth held by a few and democratic power held by the many—described in this book. For one thing, market-dominant ethnic minorities have existed, albeit rarely, in the Western nations in the past. As will be discussed below, the “solutions” the Western nations pursued to deal with market-dominant minorities were as ugly as any found in the developing world.
But even in the absence of a market-dominant minority, there is always, in any democratic, capitalist society a potential conflict between market-generated wealth disparities