Ellen,

I agree. As I wrote, I am critical of that tendency to explain the rise of the right in terms of the left's failures.

Posted at May 28, 2008 2:55 PM in response to The End of the Long Reagan Era

Dan, all I can say right now is, what an excellent question.

Posted at May 28, 2008 1:55 AM in response to The End of the Long Reagan Era

These are all really thoughtful comments. To Andy – you may be right that there is no contradiction between what is subterranean and what is an open political framing. But to me, the former implies something subconscious and therefore prior to politics, while the latter acknowledges that politicall rhetoric and strategy plays a role in producing those feelings. Thus it wasn’t just that Nixon understood those feelings, his party helped create them.

As to JT Faraday’s comments, I agree that there is very little space for the development of critical, oppositional politics for an educated public (hopefully blogs like TPM will help change that!) . But I don’t think the academic left, which is far smaller than one might think, either helps or hinders this situation, except to the degree that it animates the fever dreams of David Horowitz.

To Tom Wright, I don’t think modern conservative thinking and action has been primarily about stopping change. Although religious conservatives resist stem cell research, the teaching of evolution, etc., conservatives generally defend unregulated markets, regardless of the havoc they wreak on human communities and ecosystems. Indeed, key to the Right’s success has been to cast liberals as defensive scolds who stand in the way of unshirted Lockean individualism and capitalist development.

Finally, to Tony Foresta, it’s great to see vigorous counter-framing in action. I do think, however, that conservatism has appealed to many Americans for reasons that are not demonic. The point, it seems to me, is to analyze closely how conservatives have made their case, and why their ideas have been so attractive particularly to those who stand to lose so much by embracing them. We should also seek to understand the relationship between their rhetoric and their movement-building across the latter half of the 20th century. And we should place the rise of the Right within American political development more generally and ask how it interacts with broader and deeper dynamics such as economic stratification, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchal rule; which can by no means be attributed solely to the Right in America. Pointing out contradictions and hypocrisies is important work, but its explanatory value is limited, I think.

Posted at May 28, 2008 1:52 AM in response to The End of the Long Reagan Era

Hi, San Fernando Curt,

Your account of the post-60s left seems exceedingly narrow, and your account of the Right too natural - even romantic. The left offered a quite diverse set of options in the 60s and thereafter; approaching questions of race, gender, the environment, social class, political participation, and the nature of authority itself from numerous perspectives. Some of this was marxist, most not. Whether any of these options would have been workable can't really be determined, as they were never tried - or got a truncated test-drive as was the case with Johnson's short-lived Great Society.

As for conservatism, it wasn't simply an "visceral" option for "everyday folk" (whoever that is). Conservatives fought hard on many fronts to win over a sizable segment of the electorate, yoking a racial, antigovernment populism to a story about the organic, liberating power of free markets. To this the conservative coalition yoked social traditionalism.

The Right and its ideas triumphed to be sure, but this phenomenon was political, not a visceral form of folk wisdom.

Posted at May 27, 2008 7:17 PM in response to The End of the Long Reagan Era

Thanks everyone for the responses. To Sumbhodi, I support the kinds of universalistic programs you’re talking about. They’re desperately needed, and they should be fought for. However, I do not think we should not abandon the idea of targeted programs, nor should we give up trying to find new solutions to grapple with the specificity of racial oppression.

But it is not just that. Left unacknowledged and not dealt with, racism continues to provide a convenient set of explanations for poverty, unemployment, imprisonment, etc. And it continues to find new expressions, whether it is genomics, as I mentioned in my first post, or the ludicrous ranting of Lou Dobbs to an enormous national audience every night. Jenn of Ark is right, I think, that when people are presented with a reasonable perspective, they can let go of unexamined racist beliefs. This is why, again, that there was nothing inevitable about white backlash.

The answer to it should never have been to succumb to the logic laid out by the right in the 1960s and thereafter, but to continue to challenge the assumptions, and outright lies they laid out. At the risk of self-promotion here, my forthcoming book ‘From the New Deal to the New Right’ closely analyzes the development of backlash framing and strategy from the late 1940s until the 1970s among Republican party organizers, conservative intellectuals, Southern Democratic politicians and others. Conservatives across this time period were creative, flexible, and highly adaptive. They continually tried out new rhetorical strategies to make their politics stick. And most important, they were willing to sustain defeat after defeat. But each defeat brought them closer to victory.

My point here is that white folks aren’t inherently racist. But there needed to be sustained opposition to backlash, not acquiescence among liberals, which began quite early on. Indeed, the term itself was coined by liberal journalists and social scientists in the 1950s, who, misunderstanding the political nature of racism, wrongly chalked it up irrationality and ignorance among poor whites. By this understanding, education and economic security would solve everything in the long run without having to address race directly. Such a view left liberals ill-equipped to deal with the way that racism could be politically mobilized across classes and regions – in union halls and wealthy suburbs, in San Diego as well as Detroit or Birmingham. Many Democrats and liberals eventually responded to the conservative onslaught by embracing its racial premises. And thus do we get Bill Clinton flying back to Little Rock to oversee the execution of the mentally retarded Ricky Ray Rector on the eve of the 1992 New Hampshire primary.

I appreciate Jim Sleeper sympathizing with the sting that radicals in the 1970s must feel from his tough critiques. No offense taken here – I was still a kid in the conservative Sunbelt South where I was born and raised. I also appreciate Sleeper’s claim that he is not really a conservative. I have to say though that if he vented as much indignation on the Right as he has on left, black, feminist and gay activists, (or those who engage in what he has elsewhere called “the self-indulgent politics of racial and sexual ‘liberation’”), that claim would be a little easier to swallow.

Posted at April 6, 2008 2:06 AM in response to Does History Matter?

The responses to my initial posts have given me a lot to chew on: and more than I have time to comment on at the moment. But briefly:

As for the question that Ellen raises about history: without recourse to it, we’re stuck with other explanations for race and class inequality that obscure the nature of the problem. For some commentators, genetics comes to the fore to explain these differences. For others, cultural pathology in poor communities is the answer. We are left with a collective shoulder-shrugging that says the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts fully addressed the legacy of racism long ago – what more could anyone want? But if as Julie Novkov suggests, we look at the way that political institutions and actors have wittingly (and often unwittingly) promoted patterns of segregation, urban poverty, unequal schooling, racialized imprisonment rates, etc., we will be in far better shape to confront these problems.

As for Jim Sleeper’s comments: you are right that the New Deal’s racial exclusions were largely the result of compromises made with Southern Democrats, and that this was the set of contradictions LBJ had thrust upon him. I take this up at great length in my book “From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the southern Origins of Modern Conservatism.” I don’t criticize Obama for avoiding race – indeed I commend him in my post for having taken it up in such an incredible way in the Philadelphia speech. My criticism of him is that he has yet to confront questions of class or corporate power in meaningful ways (yet), because as I said these questions have to be taken up together.

But nevertheless, I think that there has been a strong belief among certain liberals and leftists that black radicalism destroyed an otherwise great New Deal coalition, and thereby opened the door to Reaganism. It wasn’t black radicals who caused the crisis, it was the problematic nature of that coalition itself. Yes, we can understand the compromises made by liberal democrats in those years, but surely it is wrong to lay the rise of conservatism at the feet of those who pushed hard for racial justice. Indeed, conservatives had been hard at work framing a political language that linked racism to economic conservatism long before the 1960s, as Monoxidil says in her or his post. As I said before, it is this belief in the inevitability of white backlash in the ‘60s that helped not only the rise of the right, but the rise of the DLC, and all the harsh law-and-order, anti-welfare and pro-corporate policies that this group of conservative democrats made happen.

Finally, I think that Oleeb is absolutely correct that we have to begin dealing more much more seriously with questions of wages, of fully funded education, affordable housing and the like, but these alone won’t ameliorate the deeply structural and cultural forms of racial stratification in US society. More is required.

Posted at April 1, 2008 4:34 PM in response to Losing Our Innocence