I thought that was a very good analysis of the essential difference between Norway and the US. Thanks, Sean Hayden.
Attempting to tie this in with the overall topic of this thread, I found an interview with Jonathan Metzl, the author of
Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America's Heartland. He discusses the emotional basis of white resentment and why it has a stranglehold on a particular American demographic. These people would rather literally die than willingly contribute to policies that enhance overall health and welfare of the population, because it would also enhance the health and welfare of people they despise.
Perhaps it will take time for these folks to go ahead and fade from the scene, and there is hope that their sons and daughters won't be caught in the same harmful mindset. This thread is about the alt-right, most of whom are young white men, but though their numbers have increased in the past few years, they're still a minority of young white men. Racial resentment has to die down in the US before real progress can be made toward the Norwegian model of recognizing that we are all in this together.
'Scholar Jonathan Metzl: White supremacy is literally killing white people'
I argue in "Dying of Whiteness" that we need to look at this first and foremost as a policy issue, as seen with the rising rates of gun deaths, despair from not having health care or health insurance, and tax cuts in states like Kansas that eviscerated funding for roads and bridges and schools. These policies lead to public divisiveness which in turn creates that empathy gap.
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Here is an example. There is all this rhetoric and messaging by the NRA and other parts of the right wing which connects guns to fear of "black crime" or "crime by minorities."
If you look at who are actually the victims of most gun deaths in this country -- there are 40,000 a year and two-thirds of those are gun suicides. Upwards of 80 or so percent of those suicides are white men. Ironically, white men are the main people who are dying of gun deaths in this country but there's no serious public discussion about it because of whiteness being powerful and not being interrogated enough.
That is just one example of the ways in which the type of whiteness that white people are being sold by many politicians, the news media and other influencers is literally at odds with white people's lives.
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In my book I am not discussing whiteness as a biological category. Whiteness is a social contract and a type of self-identity. One of the unifying threads of whiteness for the people I spoke to for my book was that whiteness is a privileged position that is under attack by the government or immigrants or minorities. Whiteness is something that needs to be defended. I talked to people who were literally on death's doorstep and in low-income housing communities and medical clinics who were not getting health care because Tennessee didn't fully adopt the Affordable Care Act. The one thing they were holding onto was that at least their tax dollars weren't going to what they said were "Mexicans and welfare queens."
