Slower economic progress, he suggests, encouraged large numbers of whites to support the "regressive economics" of the Reagan era and thereafter. This damaged their own socioeconomic progress, "but harms the growing communities of color even more. This sets up the country to become more politically and economically divided."

Voters are not rational. As shown in important new books such as "Democracy for Realists" and "Neither Liberal Nor Conservative," the (white) American voter is tribal, relatively unsophisticated and easily manipulated by emotion, symbolic politics and other calculations. Because of this, racial animus is extremely powerful in influencing white Americans to vote against their material self-interests and in favor of the "wages of whiteness" that come from feeling superior to nonwhites, especially black people.

Today's Republican Party, the broader right wing, their media and other leaders are masters of political sadism. They know that they can hurt white voters — especially in red-state America — and still win politically by doing so. How? By blaming black and brown people for the country's problems. The Republican Party and its allies will use the harm and pain caused by their tax reform plan to remain in power, in a variation of the white-supremacist "Southern Strategy" that has guided American conservatives since at least the 1960s.