People Are Selfish

 

It's how the individual representative of the species survives.  Look at children fighting over stuff.  Three-year olds don't really recognize the humanity of the individual they're struggling against.  (Very often we have to dehumanize the humans who have things that we want.  Israelis and Arabs is just the most recent graphic example.)  Much of childhood is learning that you can't have everything.  Much of being an adult is knowing how to navigate society to maximize what you get.  (This doesn't have to mean material things.)

But the main thing is that we're selfish.

And if we have to work together to get the things we want, we'll do so.  And if we're either wise or intelligent or both, we'll act as if betraying the group for a tactical gain is self-defeating and that it will weaken the group that we depend on, and this will been as "principled."

Many of the gains that ordinary people received during the capitalist "golden age" from 1945-1973 were achieved by policy-leaders (politicians, capitalists, economists and other academics, state bureaucrats) seeking to maximize their own benefits and the causes that helped them achieve them.

For politicians, it's electoral and policy successes.  For capitalists it was economic and social stability and a consumer market for mass-production.  For economists and others it was the new prestige of their expertise.  For state bureuacrats it was their careers and importance.

Workers formed trade unions.  Most of them in North America were white males.  How many of them grumbled about campaigns to support female and non-white workers?  The gains of women in society and in the work places were often resisted or scorned, but they were tolerated because jobs and incomes were secure and improving.  The same went for minority civil rights campaigns including affirmative action programs.  The same went for welfare supports for the poorest in society.

All those programs for minorities and (in a patriarchy) the weaker side were tolerated because the majority felt secure in their own lives.  

Now we live in a Post-Fordist, financialized, service economy.  Things like feminism, gay rights, anti-racism, etc., have cemented themselves into the popular consensus to a degree.  So when a right-winger attacks affirmative action they will often do so saying that it is an insult to people of colour.  They'll frame it as inevitably damaging to the supposed meritocracy that existed before these programs were (for whatever reason since there was no injustice ever in US-American history and Critical Race Theory is hate-speak) invented.  Because Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) will ALWAYS mean that the more competent white guy was rejected in favour of the less-qualified female and/or minority applicant.

AND THAT'S WHY SOCIETY IS FALLING APART!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Things are less secure for ordinary people and I can paint a picture of the white, male Joe Rogan listener who genuinely does have non-white friends who ascribes to the anti-DEI, CRT, anti-feminist (for him feminism is radical, shrill harpies calling for female supremicism) worldview.  By an entirely natural process, in an increasingly uncertain economic climate, the majority-white owner class will start to hire their own kind.  Often, white males will demand this.  Groups will divide themselves off from other groups.  "To survive."  Minorities will be forced to rely on their own resources, which will be even more insufficient than are those of the majority.  As a result social problems (poverty, crime) will increase among them and the supposedly non-racist Joe Rogan listener will ruefully shake his head at the "cultural" failures of communites outside his own.