The Future of Democratic Equality: Rebuilding Social Solidarity in a Fragmented America

The Future of Democratic Equality

Why has contemporary radical political theory remained virtually silent about the stunning rise in inequality in the United States over the past thirty years? Schwartz contends that, since the 1980s, most radical theorists have shifted their focus away from interrogating social inequality to criticizing the liberal and radical traditions for being inattentive to the role of difference and identity within social life. This critique brought more awareness of the relative autonomy of gender, racial, and sexual oppression. But, as Schwartz argues it also led many theorists to forget that, if difference is institutionalized on a terrain of radical economic inequality, unjust inequalities in social and political power will inevitably persist. Schwartz cautions against a new radical theoretical orthodoxy: that “universal” norms such as equality and solidarity are inherently repressive and homogenizing, whereas particular norms and identities are truly emancipatory. Reducing inequality among Americans, as well as globally, will take a high level of social solidarity—a level far from today’s fragmented politics. In focusing the left’s attention on the need to reconstruct a governing model that speaks to the aspirations of the majority, Schwartz provocatively applies this vision to such real-world political issues as welfare reform, race relations, child care, and the democratic regulation of the global economy. •

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A fascinating and controversial look at the need to rebuild a “governing project” for a majoritarian left, bridging social theory and contemporary real-world politics. Dissects postmodernism’s effect on leftist politics and how the left can transcend the false dichotomy of “difference” and “citizenship.”

Joseph M. Schwartz is Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University. He is the author of The Permanence of the Political (1995), winner of the North American Society for Social Philosophy’s best book award.

The Future of Democratic Equality Rebuilding Social Solidarity in a Fragmented America Joseph M. Schwartz Temple University

First published 2009 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2009 Taylor and Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Schwartz, Joseph M., 1954– The future of democratic equality: rebuilding social solidarity in a fragmented America/Joseph M. Schwartz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Equality–United States. 2. Democracy–United States. 3. Solidarity–United States. I. Title. JC575.S364 2008 320.973011–dc22 2008002880 ISBN 0-203-89432-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-94464-3 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-94465-1 (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-89432-4 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-94464-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-94465-6 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-89432-3 (ebk)

In memory of my father David Schwartz (1918–2002) In gratitude and love to my mother Anita Mendelsohn Schwartz And in thanks for the understanding and love from my son Michael Migiel-Schwartz

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments Permissions Acknowledgments 1

Introduction: Bringing “Difference” and “Identity” Back into Concern for Democratic Equality

viii xiii

1

2

From Domestic to Global Solidarity

27

3

Post-Structuralist Political Theory: Living in an Unreal World—Where’s You? Me? Agency?

47

Can a “Politics of Difference” (or “Identity Politics”) Ground a Radical Democratic Conception of Justice?

73

4

5

6

7

8

The Rise of Global “Casino Capitalism”: Short-Term Financial Profit Versus Long-Term Equitable Growth

105

Does Globalization Necessitate the Demise of Democratic Egalitarian Politics?

127

Racism, Difference, and the Problematic Politics of Social Solidarity

151

Conclusion—Ending the False Antinomy of “Difference” and “Equality”: Toward an Egalitarian Democratic Pluralism

177

Notes Index

187 213

Preface and Acknowledgments

This book pursues the answer to two questions. The first is rather straightforward: why, over the past thirty years, has the growth in inequality in the United States been greater than that of any other advanced capitalist democracy? The second is more puzzling: why have contemporary political theorists— including many who claim to be “radical democrats”—had little to say about this development and how it might be reversed? The silence surrounding the latter is particularly striking, given that radical theorists in the 1960s and 1970s criticized liberal pluralism for being unaware of how inequality among interests thwarts the promise of democracy. Moreover, this silence has also been a politically and intellectually costly one, as it indirectly contributed to broader political discourse taking up these issues quite belatedly. I try in this volume to develop a theoretical explanation—or what I term a “moral and political economy”—for this dual movement in both the academy and public discourse away from a concern with equality in favor of a primary focus on “diversity” and “difference.” This emphasis on “diversity,” absent a simultaneous concern for equality, poses little ideological threat to a global capitalist system that promotes “niche” markets and embraces marketing its goods to “diverse” cultures around the world. From the mid-1980s onwards, many self-defined radical political theorists shifted their focus from interrogating social inequality to criticizing the liberal and radical traditions for being tone-deaf to the role of “difference” and “identity” in social life. This critique had the salutary effect of making radical theorists and activists more aware of the relative autonomy of gender, racial, and sexual oppression and the complex nature of personal and group identity. My first book, The Permanence of the Political: A Democratic Critique of the Radical Impulse to Transcend Politics contributed to this line of inquiry, by examining the tragic costs (in both theory, and brutal practice) of the Marxist tradition’s blindness to social pluralism and “difference.” My work argued that socialists needed to reconceptualize a central role for democratic politics—and conflict—in a post-revolutionary society because social differences would never be transcended, even with the alleged or real abolition of class. In contrast, The Future of Democratic Equality cautions against a new radical theoretical orthodoxy: that “universal” norms such as equality and solidarity are inherently repressive and homogenizing, whereas particular norms and identities are truly emancipatory. Such suspicions lead some theorists of difference to

Preface and Acknowledgments ix ignore the reality that when social “difference” is institutionalized on a terrain of radical social inequality, unjust inequalities in social and political power inevitably result. To put matters bluntly: the absence of any sense of responsibility on the part of suburban Americans for the structural barriers to equality confronted by inner city African-Americans and Latino communities (and poor rural whites) illustrates how “difference”—absent a commitment to equality across “difference”—can disempower subordinate communities. And building a democratic pluralist movement to redress these inequalities will prove exceedingly difficult, if human beings cannot share a sense of commonality and solidarity across differences. This book also contends that the post-structuralist turn among self-defined “radical” political theorists has led to an inordinate focus upon epistemological questions of “identity” at the expense of analyses of the political, ideological, and economic structures that constrain and shape individual and group agency. Too many contemporary theorists either explicitly or implicitly embrace an unproductive dichotomy between the allegedly pervasive “Foucauldian” “microinstitutional” modes of “governance” (e.g. of the academy, prison, or mental hospital) that “produce” and “norm” human subjectivity, and the allegedly receding power of economic institutions and sovereign states. In social reality, however, both “micro-institutional” power and larger social structures constitute—and are constituted by—human identity and human agency. Yet the “disciplinary norms” of academic production within contemporary political theory too often constitute “subjects” (i.e. theorists) who “performatively iterate” this false choice between the allegedly subversive study of “micro-power” and the allegedly passé concern for macro-structural analysis. The post-structuralist claim that the self is inherently “incoherent,” “labile,” and “unstable” speaks to the qualities of certain sexual, racial, and “aestheticized” forms of identity. But even these “fluid” forms of identity often confront the more brittle constraints of external hatred, discrimination, and violence. And it is next-to-impossible for an individual to “perform” themselves out of unemployment, or out of their community’s lack of access to decent schooling, health care, and housing. The postmodern conception of fluid identity also runs up against the phenomena that many individuals and communities fight daily to hold on to a coherent sense of self and to improve their quality of life. The shared, lived experiences of these people do not readily lend themselves to academic efforts to “deconstruct” either their individual or collective identity. The post-structuralist sensibility in theory has certain positive effects. It has reinvigorated study of the role discourse and ideology play in social and political life. The post-structuralist turn also has constructively criticized the radical tradition’s teleological and determinist assumption that the social location of an individual or group, “in the final analysis,” determines their “objective” consciousness. And poststructuralism’s suspicion of enlightenment conceptions of “rationality” and “reason” reminds us that politics is not solely about the pursuit of self-interest, but can also be about emotive expression, as well as the care of others. However, such insights do not logically necessitate that all conceptions of “rights” are oppressive, or that all forms of macro-structural analysis are teleological and mis-guided.

x

Preface and Acknowledgments

I hope that the differences with aspects of post-structuralism’s “anti-metanarrative” expressed herein will be viewed as an effort at amicable dialog with a tradition that stresses “plurality” and, even, apostasy. But let me conclude this preface by expressing the positive, rather than “deconstructive” purposes of this work. I hope to offer a “sociology of knowledge” as to why contemporary political theory has said little about the threat growing social inequality poses for American democracy. I also draw upon the work of scholars of race and American politics, and of American political development, to explain why conservative “free-market” ideology has maintained its political hegemony since the Reagan revolution. I analyze the right’s conscious use of racial political appeals to displace growing white working- and middle-class fears of downward mobility onto resentment at affirmative action and means-tested social welfare programs. Finally, this work “deconstructs” how political elites have utilized the ideology of “globalization” to justify conservative social and economic policies. The ideology of global “neo-liberalism” contends that an advanced capitalist economy can only be competitive and prosperous if the state embraces the policies of deregulation, privatization, and fiscal conservatism. Even reputedly liberal pundits unstintingly inform the American public that they can no longer count on stable careers or long-term employment accompanied by strong social benefits. This shifting of “risk” onto the individual—as the “consultant” is the model of the new global subject—is assumed to be an inexorable consequence of globalization, as is rising inequality between highly educated “symbolicmanipulators” and casualized, insecure service workers. By examining work in comparative political economy and public policy, I challenge the ideological read that “globalization” necessitates greater inequality. In fact, much of the growth in inequality over the past thirty years in the United States has distinct political, and not structural economic, causes. The peculiarly Anglo-American form of financial deregulation and de-unionization has led to more inegalitarian outcomes in these polities as compared to those of other capitalist democracies that compete in the same global economy. Given the increased mobility of both finance and productive capital, however, greater regional cooperation among both social movements and democratic states will be needed if international regulatory and financial institutions are to be restructured to promote an egalitarian model of economic development (as opposed to the “race-to-the-bottom” cost-cutting model of global neo-liberalism). Some theorists of global justice counterpose the growth of democratic “civil society” to an antiquated “statist” politics allegedly rendered impotent by corporate globalization. Yet it is precisely the most powerful of these allegedly “impotent” states which structure the global economic institutions that facilitate transnational corporate domination of the global economy. Without social movements capable of influencing the foreign economic, environmental, and labor policies of these advanced capitalist democracies, there will be no democratic restructuring of the global economy. Thus, this monograph represents a modest effort to bring the political back into both political theory and the study of global political economy.

Preface and Acknowledgments xi My concern that political theory and political “science” speak to the world of politics partly derives from my friendships with trade union and community activists who work every day to roll back growing inequality. I hope they find some aspects of this work helpful to their own political understanding. In addition, I remain indebted to the lessons learned discussing and engaging in politics with members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), particularly the high school and university students newly drawn to radical politics. The socialist tradition does not encompass the entire breadth of the radical democratic critique of all forms of domination, but many of the insights of the socialist tradition remain vital to the pursuit of economic and social democracy. In addition, I have gained considerable intellectual and emotional sustenance from the pluralist and supportive community that is the Department of Political Science at Temple University. This is a faculty that frequently has scholarly and intellectual conversations across sub-fields and among adherents of a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches. This is no mean feat in a world of increasing academic specialization, in which technique sometimes squeezes out substantive concerns. I would particularly like to thank the aid of the graduate research assistants who have worked with me during various stages of the project: Dan Lehman, Jim Delise, Greg Graham, John Hykel, and Michael Cesal. This book would not have been possible without the time for scholarship provided by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for Humanities. I hope that the book’s intellectual contribution matches up to the faith that the external reviewers and selection committees of these scholarly institutions placed in me. In addition, a study leave funded by Temple University aided the completion of this project. I also would like to thank the editorial staff at Routledge Press, particularly Politics editor Michael Kerns. Not only did Michael maintain his enthusiasm for the project, but he demonstrated considerable patience awaiting the completion of a book somewhat delayed by my five years of duties as department chair, as well the time involved in a long-distance commute to parent on weekends. This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, David Schwartz, who passed away in December 2002 at age eighty-four. I regret that he did not live to see the book’s completion; for if I am a political theorist who knows something about economics that partly derives from what I learned being raised by two left Keynesian economists. Thus, this book is also dedicated to my mother, Anita Mendelsohn Schwartz, who played an equal role in introducing me to the world of politics, economics, and public policy. I could not have survived the rigors of parenting two-hundred-and-fifty miles away from where I teach without the love, support, and comradeship of my partner, Michele Rossi. I also benefited greatly from our numerous conversations about the themes of this book and her careful reading and commenting upon every draft. May I be as supportive of the completion of her first book, as she has been of my second. Finally, this book is also dedicated to my fifteen-year-old son, Michael Migiel-Schwartz. Parents can wax hyperbolic about the virtues of their offspring. But anyone who has met and interacted with Mike would likely

xii Preface and Acknowledgments concur that he is a true “mensch”—a smart, sensitive, and kind-hearted human being, who has more than tolerated a sometimes overbearing, but proud father. He has made parenting the most rewarding and joyous experience of my entire life. That I can no longer catch either his fastball or curve is a true sign that the passing of the generational torch is in good shape.

Permissions Acknowledgments

Joseph M. Schwartz, “Democracy Against the Free Market,” Connecticut Law Review 35: 3 (2003): 1097–1124. Excerpts reprinted with permission from publisher. Joseph M. Schwartz, “From Domestic to Global Solidarity: The Dialectic of the Particular and Universal in the Building of Social Solidarity,” Journal of Social Philosophy: 38: 1 (Spring 2007): 131–147. Excerpts reprinted with permission from Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

1

Introduction Bringing “Difference” and “Identity” Back into Concern for Democratic Equality

Political Theory Slumbers While Inequality Grows In 1995, political theorist Jeffrey Isaac, in an article entitled “The Strange Silence of Political Theory,” posed the following question: “Given the historical, political, and seemingly theoretical significance of the Eastern European revolution against Soviet communism, why have American political theorists failed to hardly address the topic?”1 In 2008, one might pose a similar question: Given the historical, political, and seemingly theoretical significance of the radical increase in inequality over the past thirty years in the United States, why have American political theorists failed to hardly address the topic? This work explores how and why mainstream political theory over the past twenty-five years has failed to adequately examine and critique the striking increase in inequalities of economic and political power. In this period, the “hottest” work in theory has focused on issues of “difference” and “personal identity.”2 Theorists of “difference” contend that the differential needs of members of particular groups means that one-sizefits-all social policies cannot achieve true equality of life chances for each citizen. I concur with this analysis; but what theorists of difference have somewhat neglected to note is that a political majority no longer exists in favor of social equality, whether a pluralist conception of equality or not. While worrying about the “homogenizing” nature of social welfare liberalism, radical political theory failed to notice that a new “universal” had triumphed within the popular imaginary: the fair treatment of each and all through competition in the unregulated market. The post-structuralist turn in political theory in part arose as a reaction to fears that “difference politics” “essentialized” and homogenized the status of the self within groups. Post-structuralism rejected both Rawlsian liberalism’s belief in a coherent, rational chooser and “identity politics” granting of primacy to the group as the prime shaper of individual identity. Instead, post-structuralism emphasized the labile, incoherent, shifting nature of a “self” constituted by “performative discursive iteration” of social norms. Post-structuralist theorists emphasized the agonal nature of politics and the ever-present possibilities that the “discursive self” could “performatively resist” hegemonic norms.3 Ironically, just as allegedly radical theorists discerned the “radical Nietzschean” possibilities of individual “resistance,” the social and political options of working class and

2

The Future of Democratic Equality

people of color in the United States were being further constrained by rapidly growing social, economic, and political inequality. The growth in racial and class inequality, in part, arose during this period because the broad political consensus in favor of the welfare state that governed European and United States politics from 1947–1973 weakened before the dominance of a global neo-liberal ideology. Known only in the United States as economic “conservatism,” this radical “neo-liberal” free-market ideology (“neo” in that it represented a rebirth of nineteenth-century “classical liberal” belief in the minimal state) believes that prosperity and equality of opportunity can only be sustained by a society characterized by a deregulated economy, eviscerated unions, and an anemic public sector. The concentration of income and wealth in the United States has reached inegalitarian extremes last witnessed prior to the Great Depression. With educational attainment heavily determining economic opportunity—and strongly correlated with parental educational and economic capital—social mobility in the United States threatens to drop to pre-World War II levels. The Economist magazine reports that social mobility rates in the United States are now the lowest among Western European states, including the supposedly class-ridden United Kingdom: Several new studies show parental income to be a better predictor of whether someone will be rich or poor in America than in Canada or much of Europe. In America about half of the income disparities in one generation are reflected in the next. In Canada and the Nordic countries that proportion is about a fifth.4 Spurred by this paradox of self-proclaimed radical theory largely ignoring this stark increase in social inequality, I explore the ways contemporary political philosophy’s primary concern with epistemological and ontological questions about the nature of “the self” and “difference” hindered political theory’s ability to speak forthrightly in favor of social solidarity and democratic equality. This work, however, is not one of political nostalgia; there will be no romantic longing here for a solidaristic, working-class-based “left” that unequivocally embraced a “universal” politics of social justice. We have had enough of these rather unsophisticated paeans to the “old” majoritarian left.5 Unlike some who write in that vein, I am well aware that forms of racial, national, and gender exclusion helped construct past forms of working-class solidarity. Moreover, the “working class” has never been a truly homogenous and “universal class.” Not only is class identity socially constructed and contested in complex ways, but large numbers of religious and socially conservative workers never embraced parties of the left. And while the weight within the left of middle-class public sector workers and those in the “helping professions” has increased in recent times, the import of this strata within the left has always been considerable. Indeed, absent the allegiance of many civil servants, teachers, journalists, and care professionals, both the European and American left would have been far weaker, both historically and in the present day. Yet, absent a revival of a pluralist, majoritarian left it is hard to imagine how

Introduction 3 “difference” (or in old school terms, “pluralism”) can be institutionalized in an egalitarian manner. In some ways, the blindness of some theorists of “difference” (and post-structuralists) to the reality that “difference” (or “diversity”) can (and is) being institutionalized on a radically inegalitarian social terrain (in which some “different” groups have much more power and opportunity than others) mimics the past weakness of the liberal pluralist theory that dominated political theory in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, radical theorists pointed out that liberal pluralist society failed to be fully democratic because some groups had inordinate economic and political power as compared to their small numbers.6 Today, the same critique of “difference” can be made. “Different” groups certainly do not have power proportionate to their democratic numbers. And the “performative” options of working-class individuals, persons of color, women, and gays and lesbians are constrained by the structural distribution of racial, economic, and gendered forms of power. Such inegalitarian distribution of power, voice, and life opportunity cannot be politically overturned absent a politics of solidarity that promotes alliances across groups in favor of democratic equality. Yet few prominent figures in contemporary political theory have analyzed the causes of the growth in economic and social inequality or its implications for the health of political democracy. This silence is particularly ironic because the theorists of the 1960s—who rescued political theory from a marginalized study of intellectual history—focused much of their critical work on the (problematic) relationship between socio-economic inequality and political democracy. To engage in a flight of intellectual fancy: What if the post-structuralist turn in literary and political theory had occurred in the 1960s rather than the 1980s? Would post-structuralist theorists and advocates of “difference” have judged the egalitarian and democratic commitments of Carole Pateman, C.B. MacPherson, Michael Walzer, Peter Bachrach, John Rawls, Sheldon Wolin, and (a pre-poststructuralist) William Connolly to be reflective of a “repressive,” “Enlightenment” commitment to “homogenizing universality”?7 Or would this new breed of feminist and post-structuralist theorists have embraced the democratic majoritarian spirit of the 1960s, while also expressing concerns about the somewhat “economistic” nature of these theorists’ critique of inequality? Constructive critics might have pointed out that the democratic theorists did not always adequately address the role that race, gender, nationality, and sexuality play in constructing inequalities of power (a role that Carole Pateman would shortly take on, without abandoning her democratic egalitarian commitments).8 The new generation might also have argued that “difference” necessitates that groups with particular needs must be treated “differently,” if equality of consideration is to be achieved. Those influenced by “post-structuralism” might have warned against essentializing “group identity” and urged theorists to attend to the ways in which institutions such as the mental health and medical profession “norm” racial and sexual behavior in ways that constrain freedom. But would the new generation have abjured the “founders’ ” concern with social equality? If the post-structuralist and “difference” turn had occurred in a vibrant, hopeful period for left politics would they have joined an earlier generation of radical theorists in taking on America’s dominant faith in the liberal

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The Future of Democratic Equality

democratic capitalist order? Would they have forthrightly argued that economic and social inequality eviscerates the alleged equal value of political citizenship? If one can envision articles of reconciliation among democratic theorists and advocates of “difference” in the hopeful 1960s, is not such a coalition of democratic theorists even more imperative in the more inegalitarian and undemocratic early twenty-first century? Would members of such a coalition concur that the social rights that underpin the equal ability of each individual to fulfill their capabilities cannot be achieved absent a majoritarian belief in social solidarity—a belief that all of us are in this social endeavor together and must be treated with equal respect. Today’s students have not been widely exposed to such a standard radical or social democratic view. They have, however, been inundated by an ideology that informs them that all regulation of the “free market” is counter-productive. Selfdefined contemporary “radical” theorists (both political and literary) have done a good job transmitting to their students a concern for “diversity” and “sexual emancipation.” But, contrary to the rants of a David Horowitz, we have not done a very good job of educating students to the part social equality must play in a democratic society. Political theory, if it is to be political, must situate itself within the contemporary historical and political context. It cannot theorize in the abstract—as a normative critique can only have bite if it speaks to people’s experience and if it discerns the possibilities for democratic transformation within the social conflicts of contemporary society. The statistics in regard to growing inequality are wellknown, but rarely have they appeared in a monograph authored by a political theorist. I would ask my fellow political theorists how a “politics of difference” or of “agonal performative resistance”—on its own—can transform the stark realities outlined below. Can such realities be transformed absent the rebirth of a politics of social solidarity in which a majority of citizens (who believe themselves capable of agency) embrace social and political movements that seek political power behind a coherent program to redress inequality? Perhaps we ought to begin every class in democratic theory by reciting statistics that demonstrate that the United States ranks as the most inegalitarian nation among the advanced capitalist democracies. The top 1 percent of United States households received 21.8 percent of all pre-tax income (including capital gains) in 2005, more than double the figure in the 1970s.9 Between 1979 and 2005, the top 5 percent of American families saw their real incomes increase 81 percent. Over the same period, the lowest-income quintile of families saw their real incomes decline 1 percent.10 And these real living standards would have declined even further if the average worker did not see a three-hundred-andfifty-hour increase in the number of hours worked per year (roughly six hours per week or a 20 percent increase, as many Americans depend on overtime or a second job or have been forced to take jobs with very little vacation and personal leave time).11 While Robert Putnam surmises that increased television watching may be the residual factor that explains the decline in adult participation in associational life, one might suspect that the elongated working year and the burdens of many families having two full-time adult income earners must be part of the causal picture.12

Introduction 5 The earnings of semi-skilled workers declined over 12 percent in this period; only the massive rise in two-parent income earning families cushioned the middle and working class from further downward mobility. In 1938, only 30 percent of women aged 18–65 participated in the formal labor market; today female participation rates of close to 70 percent rival those of men.13 And it is not only those in the bottom quintile of family income who struggle to make ends meet. As Katherine Newman’s research on the working “near poor” (families in the second quintile of family income) demonstrates, many American families have inadequate health coverage and negative assets—that is, they are one paycheck away from dire poverty.14 The distribution of wealth is, of course, even more unequal—and wealth correlates far more with (inordinate) political power than does income. The top 1 percent of United States households own 34.3 percent of the nation’s private wealth; more than the 28.7 percent owned by the bottom 90 percent. Given the rise in indebtedness as the major means of maintaining working- and middleclass families, the bottom 40 percent of American families are actually in debt to the tune of over 3 percent of total societal wealth!15 Thus, the personal savings rates declined from 11.2 percent in 1982 to negative 1.1 percent in 2006.16 And the share of corporate income going to capital (profits and interest) hit an alltime high of 23 percent in the third quarter of 2006, with only 77 percent going to employee compensation.17

The Decline of Social Solidarity in Practice and Theory In 1947, when T.H. Marshall wrote his classic essay in social theory, “Citizenship and Social Class,” he assumed that the democratic labor and social democratic parties of Western democracy would institutionalize “social rights” to equality of opportunity via the generous funding of universal public goods and social insurance.18 Thus, the “floor of the cottage of citizenship” would provide, via the public sector, high minimal levels of the basic goods central to human flourishing—education, health care, housing, and income support. As a moderate social democrat, Marshall even worried that the decrease of dependency upon income earned in the formal labor market might erode the financial incentives that sustained the high productivity levels of (mixed) capitalist market economy necessary to sustain the advanced welfare state. When I first read this text in graduate school in the late 1970s, comparative politics scholars taught it as an explication of the broad political consensus in favor of the welfare state—a consensus that had achieved the support of American liberals and moderate Republicans and European social and Christian democrats. After all, the ensuing deindustrialization of basic industry in Europe and America had yet to weaken union power and demands for greater workplace democracy and public control over investment still resonated among the European left. But what T.H. Marshall could not imagine at the height of Labor dominance of British politics in the late 1940s would be the peculiar rebirth of “laissez-faire” anti-welfare state politics that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan would utilize to overturn the previous broad post World War II consensus in favor of

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The Future of Democratic Equality

the moderate regulatory and welfare state. As I will discuss later, neo-liberal, anti-union, and deregulatory conservative politics would take an extreme form in the individualist, Lockeian political cultures of Britain and the United States (as well as New Zealand, and, to a lesser extent, Australia). The Western and Northern European welfare state has been trimmed (as has union power), but the “roll backs” on the continent have not been as extensive as the deregulation of the Anglo-American economies and the curtailment of their means-tested social welfare programs. Yet there is no doubt that the European left has been in a far weaker, more defensive position over the past twenty years than in its heyday in the late 1960s to early 1980s. Well over two decades ago, the élan of the “universal class” (the class whose interests were shared by the vast majority of society) moved from the working class to the “entrepreneur.” If the politics associated with working-class prosperity had been those of the moderate Keynesian welfare state, the policies of the new “entrepreneurial” society are those of the self-correcting unregulated “market.” For those readers who came of age in high school and college in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we can remember when the word “conservative” had as derogatory and dystopian a connotation as the word “liberal” does today (let alone “socialist”). My Keynesian economist parents at the dinner table in the late 1960s made fun of Milton Friedman and his monetarist epigones for living in the world of a never-existing “free” market. Who would have thought that Ronald Reagan would, a decade later, successfully portray the Democratic Party as the party of “special interests,” while lauding the “free market” and entrepreneurial values of the Republican Party as consonant with the “common good.” The Reaganite populist “framing” narrative informed a key “swing” electoral segment of working-class whites that the threat to their “way of life” came not from corporate down-sizing, but from the Democratic party’s capture by people of color, corrupt trade union officials, and upper-middle-class bi-coastal cultural elites. The right claimed that the Democratic Party leadership cared more about affirmative action, welfare mothers, abortion, and gay and lesbian rights than they did about the lives of the white working class. Reagan invented a “politics of difference” even before political theory had canonized the term. But his divisive “politics of difference” served as an alternative conservative explanation for the growth in inequality caused by corporate deindustrialization, downsizing, and deunionization. From the 1980s onwards, scholars of comparative politics and American political development continued to study the politics of the welfare state, often examining how path-dependent prior decisions had created strong constituencies for universal social programs and weaker support for means-tested programs—thus explaining the greater vulnerability of the means-tested programs of the Anglo-American welfare state as compared to the more universal welfare states of continental Europe. Meanwhile, “cutting-edge” social scientists moved away from traditional empirical studies of public opinion and electoral behavior to formal modeling of bargaining and decision-making—mirroring the dominance of the market paradigm and of neo-classical economics within the social sciences. While many of the “hottest” political scientists modeled how rational

Introduction 7 choosers acted under various forms of institutional constraint, “cutting-edge” political theorists increasingly denied the very existence of the coherent self. Let me emphasize again, this study is not another pean by white male left academics to a glorious past of class-based, universal struggle. Culture and ideology have always played a major role in the shaping of individual and group identity; and the left has always consisted of a coalition of progressive middle-strata and secular members of the industrial working class. To this day, secular and more educated workers still tend to vote Democratic and for the parties of the left in Europe; but less educated (and in the US more religiously devout) white workers often swing to the right on cultural rather than economic issues.19 The narratives that help downwardly mobile families comprehend their plight do not neatly divide the cultural and the economic. The growing inequality and downward pressure on living standards renders the “traditional” male-bread winning, stayat-home mom a thing of the past for most working- and middle-class twoparent households. But ire against this squeezing of family time may as easily be targeted at a perceived upper-middle-class culture that celebrates women’s entry into the formal labor market as against corporate and conservative economic policies that economically necessitate previously stay-at-home moms to enter the workforce. The contemporary right also deployed a thinly-veiled cultural politics of “white” identity to mobilize (predominantly male) sectors of the white working and middle strata against the gains of the women’s movement, civil rights, and gay and lesbian rights movement of the 1960s and beyond. The dominant narrative of the right informed white ethnic communities threatened by deindustrialization that their erosion in living standards did not result from corporate America’s global search for lowest cost production, but from liberal social policies—particularly affirmative action and AFDC—that favored poor women, minorities, and gays and lesbians at the expense of the working class. One might have imagined that the Democratic Party, even strictly out of electoral opportunism, would have offered policies aimed at relieving the pressure on people so shaken by economic dislocation and uncertainty. But a national Democratic Party leadership dependent on corporate funding neither offered a critique of “race-to-the-bottom” corporate restructuring nor an alternative economic policy that promised to redress the erosion in working- and middle-class living standards. Instead, the Democratic Leadership Council and centrist Democrats offered a kinder, gentler version of global neo-liberalism. Workers should cushion themselves against global restructuring by securing more education and through job retraining. The Clinton administration offered this mantra, but without initiating federal policies that lowered the real costs of higher education nor reshaping government labor market policies so that they adequately funded useful training for well-paying jobs. Thus, the potent conservative combination of libertarian economics and social conservatism offered to swing working-class voters met with little coherent political and ideological resistance from the mainstream center-left. Thus, from 1974 onwards, the Democrats have only captured the White House after incumbent Republican administrations have suffered through

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economic recessions. These developments crucially affected the realm of ideas and power. From 1936 until 1972 New Deal social welfare liberalism enjoyed hegemonic ideological status in the United States, as evidenced by Richard Nixon announcing in 1969 that “we are all Keynesians now” and by his expansion of public funding of Social Security and Food Stamps. Since 1974, however, particularly among ambitious young power-seekers, the peculiar (and tenuous) American conservative ideology of economic libertarianism and cultural conservatism has (until recently) the élan of a dominant ideology. The left understandably responded to attacks on the gains of the women’s and Black and Latino movements of the 1960s (and the gay and lesbian movement of the 1970s) through both political and theoretical defense of the role of pluralism within democratic society. After Nixon’s second presidential victory, the mainstream media touted the death knell of the liberal, New Deal coalition. Absent any possibility for majoritarian democratic change, many of the mass social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s focused on defending the gains of that period—particularly in regard to civil rights, affirmative action, and reproductive freedom. The cultural transformations of the 1960s did not simply wither away—women of all strata have greater life opportunities today than they did prior to the women’s movement. The civil rights movement created an AfricanAmerican professional and middle-class strata unimaginable in the days of segregation. The movement for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered rights has actually gained strength in this period of reaction (largely due to its own militancy, courage, and greater solidarity in response to the AIDS crisis). The movement still operates on the terrain of a significantly homophobic culture; anyone raising children recognizes how hard it is to be a LGBT teen in much of the United States and that homophobic slurs and even brutal bullying and, at times, violence is still visited on members of the LGBT community. But gay and lesbian people are not living anywhere near as closeted and repressed lives as they did prior to Stonewall. Yet while some gains on the sexual, racial, and cultural front remain, popular support for greater socio-economic equality has definitely declined. The covertly racial attack of the right in favor of a “work ethic” (inflected as the morés of white workers) and against government regulation and public provision also contributed to the severe weakening of labor rights. Reagan conjoined his defense of the work ethic with his attack on union power—power that allegedly defended indolent and privileged workers. The extent of this success is stunning—few Americans can today explain the role that unions play in enhancing citizens’ rights and living standards in a democratic society. The United States ranks today as the only democratic nation where there no longer exists an effective right to strike or to freely form trade unions. Since Reagan fired the federal air traffic controllers in the PATCO strike of 1980, the threat of permanent replacement workers has contributed to a radical decline in the number and duration of strikes. Widespread firing of pro-union workers; lengthy delays of union recognition elections; and the rise of a professional union-busting industry, have made union organizing increasingly difficult. No wonder United States union density is half that of Canada’s, despite poll evidence demonstrating that

Introduction 9 attitudes toward unions in both nations are fairly similar. Nevertheless, in reading the major political theory journals one would be hard pressed to find an article analyzing the role that unions play in building counter-veiling power in both the workplace and polity against the dominance of corporate capital. Rather than comprehending how high payroll and property taxes render the tax structure highly regressive, a portion of the working class (particularly those not active in unions) buys the argument that their excessive tax burdens derive from massive spending on the undeserving poor (even if AFDC only constituted a half of 1 percent of the federal budget and 2–3 percent of state budget expenditure). Should we be surprised by this politics of resentful displacement? Absent a popular discourse of class and forms of political acculturation (such as union participation) that aid workers in comprehending how global capitalist restructuring has placed downward pressure on wages and benefits, right-wing populism (as compared to centrist Democratic support for “free trade”) provides a distorted causal explanation for working-class dislocation. Yet the political behavior of the white working class remains quite complex. Controlling for income and educational level, union membership still has a powerful effect on white working-class voting behavior. The 25 percent of the electorate composed of voters from union household, still vote over two-thirds Democratic. The defections of white workers from the Democratic Party have been heavily concentrated in the South and among less educated culturally conservative Northern whites (often Catholics who are anti-choice). Non-union white male workers who do not have any post-secondary education now only vote about 50 percent Democratic.20 But class voting patterns among whites, while declining in salience since the 1960s, still have import. Even today, the Democrats win handily among white family households whose income is below the family median income. The problem for the Democrats lays in the more conservative voting patterns of Southern whites of moderate income and of deunionized culturally conservative working-class individuals across the nation.

The Decline of the Left and the Demise of Democratic Theory Some political theorists have addressed the social and political marginalization of impoverished communities of color and of vulnerable, exploited undocumented workers (Bonnie Honig, Leonard Feldman, Tommie Shelby, Kathleen Arnold and Keally DeAnne McBride come to mind).21 Some have combined normative theory with political analysis to examine the rise in inequality, but primarily in relationship to issues of identity, culture, and diversity. (Benjamin Barber, Ian Shapiro, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Amy Gutmann, Iris Marion Young, and William Connolly are among them.).22 In 2004, the American Political Science Association, under the leadership of then president Theda Skocpol, issued a report on the corrosive effects increased inequality has on political democracy. (Most of the report’s authors came from the fields of Americans and comparative politics, and not political theory).23 But high-brow journalists, more than political and social theorists, have most closely studied the effects of growing economic inequality on the working class (of all races).24

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Political theory, however, has devoted very little attention to how the right went about constructing a new dominant ideology. While post-structuralist and theorists of difference in the 1980s and 1990s attacked the rational chooser of Rawlsian liberalism as a “falsely universal” subject, the right succeeded in creating a new universal subject—the entrepreneurial, self-sufficient, competitive individual. While gleaning the titles of the three hundred or so articles published between 1990 and the present in Political Theory, the “cutting-edge” journal of the sub-discipline, one could count on the fingers of one-hand the number of articles that explicitly study the relationship between inequality and democracy. By a factor of thirty-fold or more the casual observer would find articles on “identity,” “difference,” and “deconstruction.” This is not to deny the importance that “difference” plays within a democratic pluralist society, or the intellectual validity of interrogating how dominant institutional “norms” can constrict identity and choice. But the problem that vexed Rousseau, Mill, Marx, and the founders of contemporary democratic theory remains more relevant than ever: how do inequalities in wealth, income, power, and life-opportunity contradict the formal commitment of liberal democracy to the equal moral worth of persons? Undoubtedly, the decline in the strength of the left in the advanced industrial democracies had something to do with an abandonment of interest (and faith) in majoritarian political change. As Terry Eagleton rather baldly put it in After Theory, the post-1960s weakening of the Western left and the declension of many Third World revolutionary regimes into authoritarian or corrupt regimes led many political theorists to replace the search for majoritarian social transformation with the study of resistance on “the margins.”25 Herbert Marcuse’s despair at the consumerism of the white working class of the 1960s and his embrace of students and people of color as agents of revolutionary change prefigured this focus on the excluded, repressed, and marginalized.26 Twenty years later, many middle-strata progressives followed Marcuse’s analysis by “essentializing” all white workers to be “Reagan Republicans.” Of course, well before Reagan, Wallace and Nixon had made significant inroads among Southern white workers and culturally conservative Northern workers (particularly anti-choice Catholics and white ethnics whose neighborhoods and schools were experiencing racial integration). But how many political theorists (or middle-class leftists, in general) know that affluent whites still vote more Republican than does the white working class. The one segment of the upper-middle class that votes heavily Democratic are those who hold non-professional graduate degrees (in part because they are mostly employed outside the corporate sector). Crude arguments lack nuance, but they often convey a certain truth. In celebrating difference and deconstructing the mythic nature of the “coherent” self, the “cutting-edge” of political theory over the past twenty-five years has failed to bring “class” (and economic and social equality) “back into” the study of democracy. Understanding the role that structural inequalities of class (and race and gender) play in distributing life opportunities does not necessitate a return to class reductionism or to some teleological narrative about the triumph of

Introduction 11 working-class socialist revolution. The economic should not be privileged, as human beings approach the world through cultural, social, and sexual experiences and meanings that cannot be subsumed under the economic. On the other hand, the economic is not a fictive category—a simple glance at who goes to college and who does not; and who goes to select universities and who goes to local state and community colleges should tell any academic that class remains a powerful sorting mechanism in American society. Precisely because “discourse” and ideology have import in public life, academics need to take the “discourse” of class and social structure seriously. Some may say that political and social theorists have no role to play as public intellectuals—that the professionalization and bureaucratization of “knowledge” precludes us from saying anything that affects public life. Yet few would deny that mainstream culture’s (and even corporate America’s) affirmation (and cooptation) of “diversity” has been shaped by the academy’s effort to enhance the voice of women and people of color. Conversely, the decline in attentiveness to the material dynamics of late capitalism on the part of cultural, literary, and political theorists has contributed to a decline in the mass media’s and public’s attention to issues of class and economic inequality. After all, few mainstream politicians will deny the value of working to achieve “racial” and “gender equality.” Yet the mass media and political establishment derides demands for greater economic equality as an un-American form of “class conflict.” Even John Edwards’ 2008 Democratic primary presidential campaign—the first major populist campaign for president since Jesse Jackson’s in 1988—is derided by the media as “too angry.” After over thirty years of conscious business and government attack on the rights of the working class and the poor, it remains outside the bounds of sanctioned, polite political discourse to demand a redress of growing class inequality! The decline of a sense of shared fate (or social solidarity) in the United States derives not just from greater class inequality, but also greater cultural, racial, and class spatial segregation. While post-structuralist enthusiasm for cybercommunications lauds the compression of “space and time,” “modernist” physical geography and place matter more than ever in determining a child’s life opportunity. Social solidarity—a sense of shared destiny—can only be achieved if citizens share some common cross-class or multi-racial experience—be it through the common concerns of the workplace or neighborhood. But American public spaces are now more segregated than at any time since the end of legal segregation. Unions witnessed a rather contentious competition among Blacks, Latinos, and whites for voice in the 1960s and 1970s. But with all their imperfections, unions remain the most racially and gender integrated area for civil activism in the United States. But today they only represent 12 percent of the workforce, as compared to over 30 percent in the mid-1960s. In the 1960s and 1970s, urban politics witnessed intense racial and ethnic conflict; but urban politics also gave rise to multi-racial progressive coalitions (be it the imperfect coalition politics that elected Thomas Bradley in Los Angeles, Harold Washington in Chicago or David Dinkins in New York). But given the federal abandonment of our cities, the rise of gentrified center city enclaves, and the increasing

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location of blue and pink collar jobs in suburban and ex-urban corporate parks, major urban areas have become either playpens for the global rich or over-priced residences for a beleaguered and shrinking working and middle class and an underemployed, policed, and incarcerated inner city population.27 After significant gains in school integration from the mid-1960s to mid1970s, the past thirty years has witnessed a vigorous re-segregation of schools. Legal desegregation facilitated the move of the Black and Latino middle class (and even solid working class) to the suburbs (though often inner-ring somewhat segregated suburbs), thus denuding the inner city of a key resource for social and community leadership.28 Most affluent suburbanites only see the inner city at a distance from their commuter trains or car pools. Most uppermiddle-class Americans know few, if any, fellow citizens who have served in the Iraq war and rarely interact with the urban working class (let alone the poor), unless they say hello to members of the janitorial and support staff in urban corporate office high-rises. Even among white suburbanites, political gerry-mandering and residential self-selection has meant an increase in cultural and political segregation. Americans tend to live in communities with people who are quite similar to themselves in terms of levels of educational attainment and political and social values. By 1990, 50 percent of Americans lived in Congressional districts where the incumbent party held over a 20 percent electoral advantage. Today, over 70 percent of our citizens reside in Congressional districts where the dominant party has over a 20 percent advantage in registrations. If Americans rarely engage today in neighborhood encounters across racial and class lines, we also rarely converse across cultural and ideological ones. For a brief moment in the mid-1960s Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists envisioned a vigorous politics of social and economic rights that would create greater social solidarity. This would be achieved by building lowincome and affordable housing in the suburbs and linking government-funded job training for poorer Americans with productive jobs in both the private and public sector. If housing and economic integration could not be fully achieved, at least the integration of schools across urban and suburban district lines would insure that poor children attended schools where the advocacy skills of middleand upper-income parents insured the presence of adequate resources and qualified teachers. Despite incontrovertible sociological evidence that low-income students do best when educated in class and racially-mixed schools, the policy discussion around “No Child Left Behind” excludes any consideration of integrating schools and neighborhoods or replacing inegalitarian local property taxes with progressive state income tax funding as the main source of school funding. One need not be a student of Rawls to intuit that schools with the least advantaged student body should be taught by the best, most experienced teachers, who have access to the best educational resources. Yet given that achieving equal funding per pupil remains a revolutionary aspiration, devoting extra resources per capita to less advantaged children is as unlikely an outcome in the United States in the near term as is the creation of workers’ soviets. A cursory glance at the sociology of American public education will tell us that we are a racial-and-

Introduction 13 class fragmented nation rather than a nation characterized by a vigorous, pluralist, multi-racial, and cross-class public sphere.

The Apolitical Nature of Contemporary Political Theory: Whatever Happened to Social Theory? Yet amidst the undemocratic turn in American politics and society over the past thirty years, political theory has taken a peculiarly “anti-political” turn. The field has spent more energy debating the metaphysical and ontological nature of the “self” (or, in post-structuralist terms, the “incoherence” and mythic nature of the “self”) than on discussing how selves in the real world are affected by political and economic developments—and what people might do to reverse these inegalitarian trends. For example, communitarian, feminist, and poststructuralist theorists have attacked Rawls’s conceptions of the rational self for its adherence to an antiquated “enlightenment” conception of an atomized, calculating, and coherent self.29 But Rawls, as he later explained, never intended to argue that “the self” of the original position exemplified a comprehensive ontology of the self. Rather, it served as an intellectual heuristic for the empathetic thought-experiment of “there but for fortune go you or I” that citizens committed to democratic egalitarian justice must be able to perform.30 But both Rawls and his critics seemed oblivious to the fact that by the late 1970s Rawlsian principles of distributive justice no longer sat in “reflective equilibrium” with the common sense understandings of the majority of citizens of liberal democracies. A new universal subject—the “entrepreneur” or “free chooser” of the unregulated market—had supplanted the empathetic, rational chooser of Rawls’ original position. Communitarians favored abandoning Rawls’s search for transcendent principles of justice and rejected his concept of the “atomized, rational self” in favor of an “embedded self” who lives in a community committed to the value of the “good” that is prior to the “just.” This alternative thought experiment would, communitarians claimed, lead to a more attractive politics and a “good society.”31 But communitarians have never adequately answered the repeated query as to whether and how their “good community” would obviate the need for democratic “rights” and how its “good” distributive principles would differ from those of Rawls.32 Nor does communitarian theory offer any plausible theory of political transformation. Communitarianism offers no analysis of what real world individuals and groups would band together to form a political majority in favor of communitarian aims. Nor does it provide any analysis of how such a majority would democratize and decentralize control of a global corporate economy, so as to facilitate the creation of the small-scale, bonded communities embraced by the communitarian vision. A similar “apolitical,” even other-worldly temperament characterizes scholars working on “deliberative democracy,” “communicative democracy” and “global justice.”33 None of these theories offer a plausible analysis of how to get from the “here” (of radically unequal power among interests and groups) to the “there” of an egalitarian democratic society (let alone world). One can debate whether or

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not deliberative democracy’s emphasis on the commitment of all deliberators to listening, reason, and evidence underestimates the inevitable role in politics of interest, emotion, passion, and moral verve.34 But while some deliberative qualities are necessary for sound democratic debate, deliberative democrats too often fail to consider the radical restructuring of the economic and political system necessary to achieve deliberative democracy’s equality of voice among citizens. In a world where interests are radically unequal, under-represented, disempowered groups inevitably are likely to mobilize outside the formal deliberative sphere—often resorting to disruptive, non-deliberative protest tactics—in order to force the state to grant greater voice and power to the disenfranchised. “Communicative democrats” writing in the Habermasian tradition—such as Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, Jodi Dean, and (in her more universalist moments), Iris Marion Young—are more cognizant of the need to democratize power within both civil society and the state, if reasoned “inter-subjective” communication among deliberators of equal power is to be achieved.35 But, as with Rawls, while their model explicates the equal respect necessary for democratic deliberation, these theorists downplay the political and social conflict needed to redress the radical inequalities in power that render equal deliberative power a utopian vision. When ACORN lobbies for affordable housing against local real estate interests, it is ACORN’s ability to disrupt (or elect insurgent candidates) and not their “relevant, reasonable arguments” that sway contemporary holders of political power. While the “ought” of greater global equity is a justifiable moral imperative, the “can” of how to transform the foreign trade, investment and aid policies of major global economic powers remains a crucial issue for investigating. Powerful states structure international economic regulatory norms, practices, and institutions, most often in ways that promote unjust, inegalitarian outcomes. Celebratory recognition of growing social movement cooperation across borders does not alone answer the question of how to build majority, governing coalitions that can change the foreign policies of states in both the developed and developing world. Only by doing so can international regulatory institutions be restructured so that they work to foster, rather than preclude, more equitable global development. Feminist advocates of a “politics of difference” raise crucial questions as to whether Rawls’s theory of justice adequately considers the differentials in power and interest that exist among the distinct communities or groups within a pluralist democracy. Thus, in a pluralist society of unequal power and interest, to achieve the “equal moral worth” of persons, members of the community with differential needs will have to be treated differently in order to achieve equal consideration of their needs. This point had been made over a century ago by Marx (in an admittedly economistic fashion) in The Critique of the Gotha Programme36 and, more recently, by Joan Scott in her groundbreaking essay on the role difference must play within any pluralist theory of equality.37 Feminist theorists who come out of a left tradition are careful to consider what type of “generalized” norms or empathetic reasoning is necessary to construct a shared normative commitment to democratic equality across difference. But, at times,

Introduction 15 as Anne Phillips has already pointed out, and as I will argue in later chapters, the valuation of “difference” may obfuscate the dependence of theorists of difference upon universal democratic norms when (and if) they oppose either undemocratic inequalities among “different” groups or anti-democratic practices within “different” groups.38 When Ian Shapiro wrote in “What’s Wrong with Political Science” that political science suffered from “a dichotomy . . . between the normative and empirical mode of social science,” he obviously hoped that political theory would begin to use its analytical and normative modes of inquiry to study contemporary political problems.39 Shapiro might have drawn the lines more sharply if he had called on political theorists to revisit the traditions of social theory. For the extent to which political theory’s primary focus remains the reading of texts (whether they be that of other theorists or of social reality as simply a “text” or “discourse”), it is likely to continue to ignore the empirical and historical study of the actual political world. Few political theorists consider how social and economic structures shape identity and constrain—but also enable—individual and group agency. Not that any contemporary theorist should have the hubris to compare him or herself to the grand founders of social theory—Marx, Weber, and Durkheim—but, at its best, social theory engages in a “moral economy” that examines both social and historical reality and the possibilities (and barriers) to institutional transformation that would promote a more just world. Thus, Weber not only examined the nature of modern legal-rational bureaucracy, but also the potential for plebiscitarian charismatic leadership to re-inject moral meaning into a rationalized world. Weber also worried about the tendency for such leaders to abjure moral responsibility and restraint, and thus argued in favor of institutional checks on a popularly-elected president by both parliament and the bureaucracy. Marx outlined the dynamics of a global capitalist economy rooted in the constant drive for profit and competitive innovation. But he also saw within the interdependent nature of capitalist production the potential (and need) for greater democratic control over social life. And while Durkheim agreed with Marx that modern industrial society gave rise to a complex division of labor, he worried that, absent strong associational life in civil society, the social world would be overtaken by individual anomie. How many political theorists read contemporary social science and deploy historical and empirical evidence to illuminate pressing social and normative questions? Political theory graduate students often have read far more continental philosophy—Derrida, Lyotard, or Baudrillard—than they have Barrington Moore on class relations and the origins of democracy (and dictatorship); or Peter Evans on the political sociology of development; or of Theda Skocpol on the unique origins of the American welfare state and the challenges they pose for democratizing social provision.40 While many scholars working in contemporary political theory are nominally committed to “radical democracy,” these commitments are unlikely to have much political purchase if theorists fail to comprehend how the power of the right has relegated egalitarian politics to a distinct minoritarian status. Obviously, normative theorizing will always have a valued place within political

16 The Future of Democratic Equality theory, as it enables us to refine our intuitions about the nature of social and economic justice. But abstract theory alone cannot theoretically illuminate the nature of democratic political practice—which should be the goal of at least some political theorists (one would think). The challenge for at least some theorists must be to comprehend the cultural, economic, and political developments that gave rise to the right’s hegemony—as well as the normative and strategic avenues for reversing this situation. Nor must this work be strictly a project of the pessimism of the mind. The growth in economic inequality has exposed a critical tension within the conservative coalition between its socially libertarian upper-middle-class wing (who believe in small government and low taxes, but who are modernist in their attitudes toward education and sexuality) and its culturally conservative lowermiddle-class and working-class constituents (who favor state intervention to support conservative sexual and religious norms, but who are not hostile to an economic regulatory role for the state). The surprising performance of Governor Mike Huckabee in the early 2008 Republican primaries represents the national emergence of this right-wing, culturally conservative populism. Radical social theory must analyze the contemporary political economy and balance of political forces if it is to offer a plausible political strategy relevant to the current political conjuncture. And radical democratic theory must also honestly examine the possibilities for—but also the tensions within—a theoretical and political project committed to both difference and equality. For a pluralist society built upon radical inequalities among and within “different” groups will only serve to reproduce the inequalities of liberal pluralism.

The Structure and Purpose of the Work This investigation of the politics of inequality explores the political and moral avenues for revitalizing a democratic, solidaristic politics in an age of globalization, increased social differentiation, and declining support for public provision. My previous book, The Permanence of the Political, argued that the radical tradition’s longing for a post-political society instantiating a comprehensive set of universal “true human interests” led that tradition to devalue the role of pluralism and politics in a good society.41 The core argument of this work, in contrast, cautions against a new radical orthodoxy of uncritically embracing the value of “difference” at the very moment when inegalitarian conceptions of gender, racial, and ethnic plurality have been appropriated by the right as an ideological justification for attacking social solidarity and equality. This project attempts to develop a normative and empirical analysis of why the politics of social solidarity has declined in the United States, as well as explore possible avenues for its revitalization. While sympathetic to some of the insights of “post-structuralist” and “difference” theorists, the book argues that an emancipatory politics cannot be built solely upon a “politics of difference.” Although I concur that culturally sustaining identities of “difference” are central to a pluralist democracy, so too, I hold, is the social solidarity of shared citizenship. That is, different “identities” can only be empowering if the particular

Introduction 17 communities of a democratic pluralist polity share a sense of common citizenship. Absent popular recognition that a democracy must insure substantive equality of opportunity for each of its citizens, it will remain difficult to achieve the equitable distribution of resources that enable both distinct communities and individuals to pursue their more particular conceptions of the good life. In short, “difference” is not empowering for marginalized communities that possess inadequate resources and life opportunities for their members. Thus, the moral and political challenge confronting democratic theory and practice is not that of choosing between the false antinomies of unity and diversity (or “universality” versus “particularity”), but of constructing unity through diversity and viceversa. Chapter 2 offers a historical genealogy of “solidarity,” the least “American” of the troika of moral values—“liberty, equality, and fraternity” (or “solidarity” in a less gendered form)—that inspired the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The value of “social solidarity” has always had a more contested and weaker status in the Lockeian liberal and individualist culture of the United States as compared to the political culture of the continental democracies. Nevertheless, as James Morone’s work illustrates, when social risks have been widely shared, as in war and depression, popular majorities have rallied behind universal social programs, similar to those associated with continental European conceptions of “social citizenship.”42 Absent the Social Security and Wagner Act of the New Deal; the GI Bill and Federal Home Mortgage programs of the post-World War II; and Medicare (the one universal, non-means tested social program of the Great Society), there would be far greater inequality in the United States. But universal social welfare programs in the United States tend to be “earned” by full-time participation in the formal labor market, whereas income support programs (particularly for single mother’s and infant children) tend to be means-tested. This policy legacy, combined with the cultural preeminence of a Protestant work ethic, tends to create hostility toward the allegedly “undeserving poor” (persons who are not able to participate in the full-time labor force) by members of the full-time work force who earn too much to qualify for means-tested benefits. Only in the United States, for example, is government-funded child support restricted to low-income families. If European-style universal health care and child support existed in the United States, the conservative attack on the post-war liberal welfare state consensus might have taken on a more moderate continental slowing of the growth of the welfare state. The American right consciously harnessed populist hostility to means-tested social welfare programs to construct a presidential political majority between upper income libertarians and segments of a (predominantly white) working and lower-middle class in favor of deregulation and upward redistribution of income via tax cuts for the affluent. Chapter 3 explores the contribution theorists of “difference” have made to the study of democratic equality, but also contends that a “democratic” conception of “difference” must be tempered by a concomitant commitment to the equal moral worth of persons, both across groups and within groups. As earlier stated, “difference” theorists brought to democratic theory a healthy emphasis on the

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The Future of Democratic Equality

role that socially constituted groups play in the shaping of individual identity. Different “standpoints” and experiences of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality affect the interests and desires of many citizens. Uniform social policies that do not take into account the needs of distinct communities and their members cannot provide individuals with an equal ability to flourish. For example, today, working women need relief from the burdens of the double-day and thus have an interest in generous, publicly-funded parental leave and socialization of care responsibilities. Given past and present discrimination against persons of color and women, affirmative efforts (beyond traditional modes of selection) are necessary to insure fair and equitable treatment in the job market, as well as in application for places in institutions of higher education. Yet democratic public policy must also consider the structural barriers that low-income and working-class people of all races face in regard to educational and labor market opportunities. The absence of such provisions in contemporary affirmative action policy contributes to hostility to affirmative action on the part of many working-class whites. This resentment illustrates how policies overly informed by sensibility to “difference” can, at times, neglect shared interests and common identities. The democratic case for treating particular individuals or groups in an “affirmative” or “special” manner must be justified by proving that such treatment is the only way to insure these citizens the equal consideration due each and all citizens. Thus, to build a democratic justification for “particular” treatment, a democratic politics of difference cannot avoid moral justifications that are universal in nature.43 While culturally sustaining identities of “difference” must be valued by a pluralist democracy, if that democracy is also to be an egalitarian one, a norm of solidarity must exist among citizens, a norm that cuts across difference. Citizenship need not be a “homogenizing” category that reduces all the pursuit of the exact same needs and interest. But if a common moral belief in the equal moral worth of the individual is not socially nurtured and defended, then “difference” will inevitably play out on a radically unequal terrain of power and resources. “Difference” is not empowering to “subordinate” individuals if it means that inner city, immigrant, and de-industrialized communities are “equally” subject to the play of an allegedly “fair” market. Today, the ideology of the “fairness” of marketplace competition (and of the “self-made” individual) trumps the democratic left’s traditional belief that only redistributive policies— progressive financing of high-quality universal public goods and strong social insurance—can insure a modicum of equality of opportunity for all. Absent the rebuilding of moral and social bonds that cut across “difference”—of the bond of “solidarity”—a democratic pluralist and egalitarian project will remain a chimera. Chapter 4 examines whether the post-structuralist turn of the past twenty-five years in political and social theory contributes to a radical democratic theoretical and political project. Post-structuralist conceptions of the “hybrid,” “plural,” and “inconstant” nature of “identity” have sometimes served as a useful caution against “essentializing” group identity. The pervasive influence of the writings of Michel Foucault has also contributed to a focus on how “micro” institutions—

Introduction 19 religion, the medical and psychiatric professions, the prison—“norm” behavior via the individual’s “performative” inscription of prescribed behavior.44 Wendy Brown’s influential States of Injury usefully cautioned that certain forms of “identity politics” are overly dependent upon a sense of “wounding” and “disempowerment,” thus institutionalizing a group identity that precludes open and “agonal” affirmative political action—action which often violates the dominant “norms” of “group identity.”45 Brown and other post-structuralist influenced work reminds us that group identity is complex, contested, and always in a process of flux and reconstitution. But this does not mean that groups are simply fictions or that individuals through “performative resistance” are free to re-inscribe whatever alternative norms they choose. Often racist, gendered, heterosexist, and economic social structures and institutional practices (including institutional violence) limit individuals’ “performative” options. No one can “perform” themselves out of the material constraints of scant economic resources or out of the structural relationship of being “bossed” by someone of higher authority and power. (Of course, one can feign higher cultural capital; but one can’t invest in equity markets if one does not have the requisite economic resources). And gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans-gendered residents of culturally conservative communities have much less ability to “transgress” than do residents of bohemian urban communities (where, again, “performative” choices are not always equally available to every individual and in every circumstance). Furthermore, if selves are so decentered that they are “rhizome”-like or “schizoid” then the concept of “performative resistance” becomes extremely problematic. Just “who” is choosing the performative strategy? In a world where many individuals search for meaning or coherence in their lives—or feel alienated by social institutions they cannot affect—to posit the total “deconstruction” of the self represents both an overly idealist (and anti-realist) philosophical position.46 Try convincing anyone who is not a graduate student in cultural studies that their efforts to “get their lives together” are mythic, constraining, antiliberatory efforts and you will get a deservedly quizzical look. James Glass’s powerful study of temporarily lucid schizophrenics’ accounts of the pain and horror of life as a split-self serves as a powerful antidote to extreme poststructuralist celebrations of the “decentered” self.47 One need not embrace a “fixed” notion of group identity to comprehend that individuals are often shaped by historical and contemporary experiences that they share with others. In part, political and cultural “resistance” involves efforts to create “group narratives” that empower, rather than constrain, individuals. (For example, the contemporary experience of discrimination against Spanishspeaking immigrants contributes to the formation in the United States of a new pan-Latino identity different from—but overlapping and contesting with—the national identities of particular Spanish-speaking immigrant groups). Foucauldian attention to “micro-power” and the “normalizing” and “categorizing” capacity of bureaucratic and repressive institutions of “governance” (be it the asylum, therapy, or the hospital) long ago transplanted Marxism as the “grand meta-narrative” (of, if you like, the “meta” anti-meta-narrative) of the academy.

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The Future of Democratic Equality

One might even posit that discussion of political economy, the power structure of capitalism, and the resistance to economic exploitation, has been “repressed” within the “micro-power” and “institutional norming” of post-structuralist political theory. Yet the ability of macro-structural economic, political, and cultural power to constrain, as well as enable, agency remains as powerful as ever. The post-structuralist rejection of any realist conception that economic and social institutions constrain the choices of individuals has occurred at a time of rapidly increasing global violence and economic and material inequality. Several critics of post-structuralism have pointed out the ironic element in the timing of this development. A (somewhat reductionist) “sociology of knowledge”—akin to that offered by Terry Eagleton in After Theory—might contend that, absent mass social movements contending for state power, many “radical” academics retreated into the realm of pure theory from the 1980s onwards.48 The rejoinder to this charge might be that post-structuralism’s insistence on the relevance of the particular, local, and hybrid has had a salutary effect on limiting the imperial claims of “grand narratives.” This may well be the case; but in the meantime, the imperial practices of capitalism and its “grand narrative” of marketplace freedom have colonized “microinstitutional” life. Thus, macro-structural and historically-oriented attempts to discern the interaction between social agency and social structure are likely to return as a method for analyzing global capitalism. In addition, the post-structuralist concern with the fate of “subaltern” and “marginal” groups inevitably must push ethical concerns beyond poststructuralism’s emphasis on the local and particular. The quasi-universal concepts of citizenship and human rights may not have an irrefutable, a priori basis in a fixed human nature. But if human beings cannot develop shared understandings and values that bridge their differences, it is unlikely that the democratic project embraced by many post-structuralists will ever be realized. Absent such moral commitments, why would human beings who are not members of “marginal” groups care about the emancipation of the dominated. Nor is it evident how dominated groups gain a critical moral edge against dominant groups absent moral appeals that persuade members outside their particular group. The second half of the book (Chapters 5–7) constructs a “moral economy” or political sociology of the growth of inequality in the United States (and, to a lesser extent, Western advanced democracies) from 1973 onward. During this period, mainstream politicians lost faith in the broad consensus behind the (moderate) Keynesian welfare state policies that had governed Western polities in the post-World War II era. I term this study a “moral economy” because of the central role that “moral” or ideological appeals played in the construction of a political majority behind the Thatcher-Reagan governing project of economic deregulation, de-unionization, privatization, regressive tax reform, and the weakening of public provision (particularly in regard to means-tested social welfare programs, such as AFDC). One cannot comprehend the “governing” or hegemonic status of these neo-liberal policies absent the right’s ability to attract a majority of the electorate around a value-laden program of ending the alleged

Introduction 21 unproductive coddling of the indolent by the welfare state. The right’s deregulatory, anti-government program (except for strong police and defense functions) centered on an appeal to the alleged fairness of the free market, the universal value of “entrepreneurial, risk-taking” behavior, and the (often racialized) “work ethic.” The fifth chapter explores the predominant structural economic explanation, as compared to a politically-centered analysis, of the causes of growing inequality. Many social scientists and popular commentators claim that the global, “post-industrial” capitalism of the late twentieth century inevitably brought about an increase in social inequality. This structural narrative, widely popularized by the writings of Thomas Friedman, contends that the emergent information, finance, entertainment, and personal service sectors displaced industrial manufacturing as the core functions of the advanced capitalist democracies. Therefore, greater income shares went to citizens who possessed scarce “symbolic-manipulative skills.” The most productive, high-wage jobs demand greater educational attainment and the scarcity of these “knowledge workers” explains the shift in wage-shares from skilled and semi-skilled industrial workers to educated white-collar workers. In addition, the argument continues, the shift in basic industrial production (steel, rubber, coal, and auto) to newly industrializing nations costs union jobs in basic manufacturing, as well as placing downward pressure on remaining manufacturing wages. This, again, is a partial truth. Economists concur that international competition contributes to wage stagnation—and the costs of this restructuring falls heavily on older displaced workers who lose these jobs (particularly in the United States, where job retraining is less well-financed and less integrated with the labor market). In addition, the failure of United States foreign policy to press for labor, environmental, and human rights standards in global trade and investment agreements places further downward pressure on living standards in both the newly industrializing countries and the core capitalist states.49 But few labor economists believe that “race-to-the-bottom” wage competition is the major cause of growing inequality, particularly given the core capitalist state’s ability to stay competitive in highly-skilled specialty manufacturing. While there is a partial truth to this structural explanation of greater wage-inequality, over-reliance on this narrative negates attention to the “varieties of capitalism” that still exist among the advanced capitalist states. The Anglo-American neoliberal variant has deregulated the financial sector more rapidly than has continental Europe (though financial deregulation is definitely a global trend). The greater integration between finance capital and corporate capital in Northern Europe, plus a less developed stock market culture, combined with greater concern for long-term profitability, restrains Northern European capital from fully embracing the cost-cutting, anti-union tactics of the speculative, “turbocapitalism” of the United States (and to a lesser extent United Kingdom). Most scholars of comparative capitalism contend that state policy still matters; economies are more globally integrated than before, but the terms on which economic integration occurs remains heavily influenced by the social and economic

22 The Future of Democratic Equality policies of the nation-state.50 Thus, growing economic inequality and insecurity is neither inevitable nor inexorable—it results not just from global structural trends, but also from political decisions and public policies that can be reversed. The obsession of late capitalism with short-term profit and stock-market gains is greatest in the United States. Not only has the United States led the capitalist world in the displacement of risk from employers to employees51 (in the form of defined contribution rather than defined benefit pensions and cuts in employer contributions to health care coverage), but the United States has led the globe in the “securitization” of risk. While the global impact of the United States sub-prime mortgage crisis demonstrates that hedge-funds and securitized loans (packages of loans traded as a security) have become part of European and Asian bank and investment house portfolios, the hyper-growth of United States and United Kingdom deregulated financial markets has definitely driven this phenomenon. These trends have accentuated the shift in income shares from labor to capital, particularly finance capital. In addition, the Anglo-American regimes have been outliers in regard to the conscious government and corporate attack on unions and the right to organize. The United States is the only capitalist nation with a huge “union-busting” industry of consultants and lawyers. Even moderate labor economists admit that the precipitous drop in unionization rates (from 28 percent in 1973 to 12 percent today) has contributed significantly to the growth in inequality. And this de-unionization has not just come in industrial sectors vulnerable to outsourcing and foreign imports. Government deregulation of the domestic-based transportation, trucking, and telecommunications industries cost this nation many of its better-paying unionized jobs. The earliest attacks on union wage and benefit standards came in the construction industry and against state and municipal unions in right-to-work states. Neither the construction trades nor the civil service are economic sectors subject to global competition. Even the auto industry—the sector most vulnerable to overseas production— has lost more unionized jobs (with good retirement benefits) due to shifts in domestic production than because of overseas imports. In part, robotization and increased worker productivity enables four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand domestic auto workers today to produce the same ten million cars that nearly one million workers produced in 1980. But rarely does the press mention that foreign “transplants”—plants in the United States producing Toyotas, Nissans, Hondas, BMWs, and Mercedes—employ one-hundred-thousand United States autoworkers in mostly anti-union Southern states. Finally, American government and corporate labor policy has consciously placed downward pressure on wages in the service sector by radically lowering the real value of the minimum wage and by employing large numbers of vulnerable undocumented workers in home care, construction, and landscaping, and the (often once unionized) meat packing and food processing industries. Such practices indirectly places downward pressure on all wage-workers and transfers income from service sector workers to the more affluent consumers they serve. The sixth chapter argues that the United States represents an inegalitarian outlier as compared to Northern European states which have not fully embraced

Introduction 23 the politics of “neo-liberalism.” Deindustrialization and a decline in labor force participation rates (due to an aging population and lower female workforce participation rates) has contributed to a decline in the rate of growth of public revenue in Europe and thus to the “trimming” of the European welfare state. But the more universal programs of public provision and social insurance of continental Europe have held up better than has the more means-tested programs of the United Kingdom and the United States.52 However, one should not romanticize a European social democratic model that has been weakened and remains on the political defensive. The exportoriented economies of Austria, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands are often cited as models of “flex-security”—nimble economies in which government-aided job training and high levels of income security both sustain high levels of equality and also encourage workers to shift out of jobs that are no longer internationally competitive. The much larger, more diverse economies of Germany, France, and Italy have experienced greater problems with unemployment and deindustrialization. But greater social intolerance of low-wage, temporary jobs and greater residual union strength limits the proliferation of United States-style low-wage service employment in Western Europe. Such resistance is possible in France and Italy, despite relatively low union-density rates, because state policy makes it very difficult to fire permanent workers. Collective bargaining laws also insure that a small number of dues-paying union members in a firm can still secure a binding contract that covers all employees. Thus, well over 50 percent of workers in both these countries are governed by binding union contracts (versus under 18 percent in the United States).53 The greater rigidity of Northern European labor markets does give rise to higher youth unemployment rates and greater duration of university studies (70 percent of Italians between the ages of 20–30 still live with their parents!). But this queuing up for jobs is subsidized by relatively generous social insurance payments or university stipends and, thereby, limits the growth in United Statesstyle inequality. In a perfect world, the French and Italians would move toward the flex-security model of Northern European labor market policy. The lack of corporatist cooperation between government, labor, and industry (as compared to Northern Europe) and the more decentralized structure of French and Italian industry makes a remake of the political economy of these nations unlikely. But it is possible that the left (and unions) will eventually agree to less rigid labor market policies in return for greater income security and more effective job retraining programs. Nor is continental Europe the laggard in industrial production that United States conservative pundits would lead one to believe. Hourly productivity rates of manufacturing employees in Europe rival or surpass those of American workers. American workers remain “the most productive in the world” only because they work, on average, three hundred hours more per year than the average worker in other advanced capitalist societies. While most Americans recognize continued German dominance of the high-end auto industry, machine tools, and skilled engineering goods (such as printing presses and medical instruments), few are aware that the French remain a power in the

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The Future of Democratic Equality

chemical, pharmaceutical, civilian nuclear power, and aerospace industries (including a rather seamy defense export industry which rivals the damage that United States and Russian arms exports do by selling arms to any and all in the developing world). The Italian economy will face the greatest difficulty adjusting to shifts in global production because its labor-intensive craft production (in textiles, fashion, furniture, and leather goods) has been affected by low-wage competition and knock-offs from China and other newly industrializing nations. But, as with the rest of Western Europe, preserving Italian economic competitiveness will depend on their up-skilling their work force and not in deskilling and deunionizing it. In short, the inegalitarian Anglo-American “neoliberal” model of economic growth (heavily dependent on the hypertrophy of the financial market and on exporting financial services abroad) remains unattractive to the rest of the advanced democracies. The “sick men of Europe” analysis is belied by European growth rates over the past decade being comparable to those of the United States and United Kingdom. German growth rates have been only slightly lower than those of the United States, despite Germany absorbing an East German economy less than half as productive as its own and containing a population equal to 25 percent of the Western sector. Western European birth rates are down and the population is aging. But immigration from Eastern Europe and North Africa is already reinvigorating the Western European labor market. Europe will face serious problems of cultural and political integration, given its growing multi-national population, as many European states have dominant conceptions of citizenship more tied to birth and lineage than those of the United States. But there is no reason to believe that Europe cannot adapt to this challenge as well as the United States. Exclusion has and will occur; and the tradition of solidarity is often tied to nationalism and nativism. But if the challenge of the United States is to bring greater egalitarian solidarity to bear on its liberal embrace of (inegalitarian) cultural pluralism, Europe faces the converse problem of extending solidarity to an increasingly pluralist population. Nevertheless, inequality has grown considerably less in continental Europe than in the United States and its neo-liberal cousins. This is in part because of a stronger tradition of social solidarity and a greater commitment to workers’ rights, progressive taxation, and public provision. Social mobility rates are now greater in Europe than in the United States. While the material standard of living in Western Europe may be slightly lower than in the United States, overall health and longevity rates are higher (and more equitably distributed across class). Most importantly, the European work year and work life is far less demanding than the American. Most Americans would think they landed in heaven if they had five or six weeks of vacation per year at full wages and benefits. But such lengthy vacations are the standard in most of Northern Europe. So how did the policies of the economically libertarian right gain dominance in a United States from the early 1970s onwards? In Chapter 7, I examine how the conservative movement in the United States engaged in a conscious racial politics after the civil rights revolution of 1964 to “realign” a significant portion of the white middle and working class into the Republican Party. Conservatives

Introduction 25 helped construct and then appeal to an emerging “white identity” that transplanted previous ethnic political identities. This “white” identity has a strong moral affinity with a “meritocratic” ideology that perceives redistributive public policies as discriminating against hard-working “whites” in favor of people of color and immigrants who do not adhere to the “work ethic” (narrowly defined as fulltime participation in the formal labor market). This ideology’s obsessive attack on affirmative action conveniently ignores how white immigrant groups used state power to leverage economic opportunities via government contracting, uniform and civil service employment, and teaching jobs. Absent this leveraging of political power into state-influenced employment, there would have been much less social mobility for Irish, Italian, and East European Jewish immigrants.54 The concluding section of the chapter examines debates on the left about how best to respond to the right’s racial politics. Populist hostility to taxation, wedded to a declining faith in the efficacy of government, forms an integral part of the political consciousness of white swing voters. Social democratic-oriented public intellectuals, such as William Julius Wilson and Theda Skocpol, contend that progressives should “deracialize” American politics by invoking a race-blind politics of universal rights and responsibilities. An expansion of universal social programs, they contend, will bring disproportionate benefits to low-income individuals and communities of color.55 As laudable as these goals may be—progressive taxation and high-quality universal public provision of health care, education, and job training—efforts to “deracialize” politics in favor of a class-based social democratic politics ignores how the very concept of citizenship in the United States is constructed upon the terrain of racial discourse and (mis) perceptions. Conservative attacks on means-tested programs such as AFDC and Medicaid have engendered a populist mistrust of government expenditure as inefficient and subversive of the work ethic. Thus, a revival of faith in activist government is unlikely to transpire absent a conscious political and educational effort to “deconstruct” this conservative, “raced” conception of the public sector. Progressive intellectuals and activists must also recognize that working-class suspicion (of all races) to taxes and public expenditure is not (contrary to the arguments of Thomas Frank56) totally irrational, as the tax structure in the United States is highly regressive—due to the flat-rate FICA tax and an overreliance on property taxes to fund schools and local governments. Thus, progressive intellectuals and activists face a major task in reviving faith in (and knowledge of) the central role that universal social rights have played in extending democracy’s promise to all citizens. Reconstructing such a commitment to social solidarity will not be easy because the geographically and socially fragmented nature of American society renders it harder to construct solidarity across “differences” in educational, cultural, and economic capital. But unless a majority of American voters come to recognize that growing inegalitarian access to quality health care, jobs, child care, and education cannot be redressed absent major public policy initiatives (and the reconstruction of equitable forms of raising public revenues), the second Reconstruction’s promise to eliminate separate and unequal communities will remain unfulfilled.

2

From Domestic to Global Solidarity

The Anemic State of Solidarity in the Contemporary United States In the United States, social solidarity is the forgotten sibling among the family of democratic values—“liberty, equality, and fraternity”—that suffused the democratic social revolutions from the French revolution onwards. While schoolchildren in the United States are taught that our revolution fought for the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the less liberal individualist and more democratic collectivist, anti-feudal French revolution spoke of “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” (Subversive instructors will inform students that Jefferson decided in favor of the more felicitous “pursuit of happiness” over Locke’s more blatant “pursuit of property.”) The concept of “fraternity” or “solidarity” (in gender neutral terms) implies that in the course of constructing the common enterprise of democracy, members of a democracy develop a capacity for empathy toward and trust in their fellow citizens. In societies governed by hierarchical norms of caste and status, social obligations and duties are set by customary practice and tradition. In contrast, democracy grants a voice to all in the establishment of legal relationships. Democratic justice aims to insure that such obligations and duties are shared equitably. The democratic polity self-reflectively reviews and regulates the social relationships established by economic and cultural life. Thus, all democratic societies, at a minimum, are nominally committed to insuring that no citizen is so destitute or socially marginalized that she or he cannot participate in political life. Much of the historic struggle between democratic left and right has revolved around the extent to which social rights—public provision and social insurance—should constrain the inegalitarian outcomes of a market-based economy (and an allegedly meritocratic educational system). By means of political conflict (rather than abstract philosophical argument), democracies develop social policies and institutions that cushion individuals from the risk and vicissitudes of the marketplace and the life course. Thus, even the most classically liberal of democratic polities provide minimal levels of universal insurance against disability, unemployment, and old age. (Only the United States limits social insurance against illhealth to the poor and the aged.) The ultimate democratic trust resides in the sharing of the burden of bearing

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The Future of Democratic Equality

arms to defend the nation. The willingness of all men of newly republican France to bear arms enabled revolutionary France to repel the simultaneous attack of the imperial armies of Austro-Hungary, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom. On the other hand, the decline of social solidarity in the contemporary United States is starkly manifested by the costs of the war in Iraq being borne by a socially isolated, “economically drafted” army of the working class and poor (disproportionately black, brown, and rural white poor). These soldiers allegedly fight to “protect” a nation whose affluent strata barely notice that we are “a nation at war,” as not even their taxes have been raised. The Blackwater corporation epitomizes the “privatization” of public service in post-Reagan America— over thirty thousand retired white military officers and non-coms “work” in Iraq as mercenaries for ten times the remuneration of the public armed forces our society supposedly reveres. (Another, more diverse—often foreign—one hundred thousand private personnel provide low-wage services that used to be performed by more costly military personnel.)1 And GI bill benefits barely pay community college tuition, let alone provide for living expenses! Let us take as a working definition of solidarity the readiness of individuals to aid other members of a common enterprise—an enterprise in which each recognizes the interdependent nature of the common enterprise and thus a moral (and instrumental) duty to promote a minimal level of well-being for all other members. Political theorists have long debated whether such an impulse derives from a universal human inclination to aid those less fortunate than ourselves2 or from human engagement in particular activities that construct bonds of mutuality among their members (the classic example being the shared burden of work symbolized by the trade union motto “an injury to one is an injury to all”). In the process of constructing shared obligations of care, collective enterprises, including democracies, inevitably define a “we” versus a “non-we” or “others.” Yet the historical expansion of shared risk and aid from the family to the tribe to the fellow citizens of an advanced welfare state demonstrates that there are no inherent membership limits to a solidaristic community. On the other hand, the bureaucratic nature of the welfare state provides a weaker emotive connection among its members than the bonds of direct aid of the religious congregation or the shared risks of the military platoon. (Hence, Claus Offe’s worry that the generations that fought for the benefits of the welfare state are less likely to free ride on them than do some of their offspring.3) This particularist notion of solidarity—the community of “we” versus “them”—constituted by the coercive boundaries of a political community remains one pole of the dialectic of democracy and solidarity. Democratic social movements frequently attempt to expand the popular conception of who is part of the “we.” Often in times of national crisis and broad social vulnerability bonds of solidarity expand and strengthen, as do social policies that insure a universal economic and social floor under which citizens cannot fall. Hence, we associate the New Deal and the French Popular Front government with the shared vulnerability of the Great Depression and the United States’s GI Bill and the radical expansion of the British welfare state with the demands of workers to be fully incorporated into the national community for which they had just risked their

From Domestic to Global Solidarity 29 lives in battle. The Cold War project of fighting for “the hearts and minds” of decolonizing peoples around the globe provided crucial leverage for insurgent movements of peoples of color to demand full citizenship in the United States. But absent moments of shared sacrifice across groups, the bonds of social solidarity prove more difficult to strengthen and expand. Both radical theory and practice have yet to come to grips with the difficulty of expanding social rights (even of defending existing ones) during periods of capitalist stagnation and restructuring. During such periods—which we live in today—the middle strata feels they cannot afford to be generous and conservatives redirect the anxieties of deindustrialized workers against those racial minorities and immigrants with even more tenuous connections to the formal labor market and greater dependence on (often means-tested) social provision. Solidarity originated within the fellow-feeling of particularist organizations— the guilds of medieval society. In modernity, such self-help organizations often had a basis in ethnic, immigrant, racial, or gender solidarity (think of the sisterhood of 1960s consciousness-raising groups) or the combination of self-interest and ideological commitment that has historically motivated trade union activists. But democratic solidarity involves the (weaker) capacity for identity among citizens of their shared risks and vulnerabilities and of the need for social policies to distribute these risks in a fair and just manner. That is, the social insurance and public provision of the welfare state—financed by a progressive taxation system that determines that contribution will have a comparable disutility for each citizen—is the sine qua non of solidaristic social policy. One should not exaggerate the other-oriented or altruistic motivation behind supporters of such policies. The enactment of these policies more often resulted from class and political struggle rather than from pre-existing social harmony. At times, conservative and moderate elites enacted such policies in an attempt (often futile) to quell the growth of working-class solidarity and political militancy (think of Bismarckian Germany or Lloyd George’s liberal England). This expansion of bonds of mutuality through democratic struggle does not mean that the bonds of mutuality are limitless. Democratic struggles over generations gave rise to the cultural norms and traditions that sustain mutual provision at the level of the democratic state. A cynic might even argue that it is the self-interest of current beneficiaries—rather than an inter-generational perpetuation of the solidarity of those who originally struggle for social rights—that insures the political loyalty of those who benefit from social insurance and public provision. Thinner notions of a common humanity can and have sustained international humanitarian aid efforts and growing international institutional efforts to deal with crises of the commons. But thick agreement on distributive justice has thus far only been (tenuously and contentiously) established at the level of the state—with the most promising regional effort, the European Union, coming in an area where shared cultural norms have been developed over five hundred years of brutal conflict, as well as recent economic and cultural integration. Nascent efforts to achieve some enforceable minimal conception of basic human rights—freedom from torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and slavery—are

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The Future of Democratic Equality

still in their infancy. Absent an effective global enforcement agency (if not a global state, a United Nations human rights interventionary force that can be rapidly and legitimately deployed), the violation of such norms will too often remain the homage that vice pays to virtue. This is not to wax a cynical international realist—international norms matter, as do the pressures that transnational organizations and social movements can bring to bear upon regimes both economically and in the court of public opinion. But the intransigence of massive human rights violations in the Congo, Darfur, and Myanmar demonstrate the limited effect global civil society can have upon intransigent, repressive regimes.

Solidarity and Democracy What does solidarity (or in the masculinist terms of the French Revolution, “fraternity”) have to do with the development of democracy? First, democratic citizens must have sufficient empathy and respect for other citizens that they take umbrage when their “fellows” are excluded from the ability to participate in public life—whether through overt discrimination or through radical inequities in social resources and political power. The concept of solidarity is as alien to the American polity as at any other time in our history. Much of the upper-middle-class lives in affluent suburban enclaves, even “gated communities” (where public space is literally privatized and privately patrolled!). The poorest 10 percent of our nation is mostly quarantined within inner cities (or literally imprisoned), where the average resident faces life opportunities and a life expectancy radically divergent from those of the rest of the nation. Another 25 percent (Katherine Newman’s near-poor) of American families survive on annual incomes of twenty to forty thousand dollars a year, with the avoidance of abject poverty being just one missing paycheck or one serious medical emergency away.4 Given that elite universities and colleges, as well as graduate programs, recruit less than 15 percent of their student body from children of families who earn below the median family income, it is likely that many readers of this book cannot imagine what it is like to grow up in a family whose gross income is below the median of forty-seven thousand per year. American apartheid (racial and class) is alive and well, but few dare call it by its name. From the Reagan administration onwards, conservative political hegemony has nearly obliterated from the public mind the ideals of social rights and social insurance. Conservative policies of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, combined with massive budget deficits, have blunted the tools of solidaristic social policy in the United States—progressive taxation funding high-quality, universal public provision and generous universal social insurance schemes.5 In part, this impoverished democracy arises because the primary American public role is that of a passive consumer—the agora of the mall has replaced the agora of the polis. Marketplace freedom is the ideology of our eviscerated democracy, as consumer choice involves neither deliberation nor production. Transnational corporations create desires for their goods and we “choose” how to consume in

From Domestic to Global Solidarity 31 the privacy of the shopping aisles or in front of on-line catalogues. Despite the efforts of the living wage and global justice movements, few Americans are conscious of the horrendous working conditions under which the products we consume (cheaply) are produced. Consumers need not care for the moral quality of those who consume next to them. But in a democracy, in which all share responsibility for the common good, citizens must be concerned for the moral well-being of their fellow deliberators (and, in times of threat to their freedom, the quality of those who bear arms next to them).6 The declension of the value of equal citizenship in the United States is best epitomized by how our polity funds political campaigns. Ever since the Buckley v. Vallejo decision of the Supreme Court in 1976, the highest law of the land treats money as a form of personal speech. Thus, those who have the most economic resources, have the most voice. And voice—speech—is what influences votes in a democracy. The quality of a democracy depends not just on the secret ballot, but also on the manner of deliberation and public discussion that precedes the vote. Historically, the willingness to redistribute goods and opportunities depends upon seeing others as moral equivalents—there but for fortune go you and I. Such mutual identification historically has depended primarily upon exclusionary definitions of community membership transmitted via ideologies of nationalism, racism, and masculinity. The brotherhood of republican virtue heavily depended upon a pride of self-sufficiency—the self-sufficient owner of arms. Recognizing this historical reality, feminist theorists such as Carol Gould, Nancy Fraser, and Anne Phillips argue that radical democrats must reconstruct public policy so as to transcend its naturalizing the unit of social protection and consumption as that of a nuclear family with a male bread-winner and a stay-athome mother/provider.7 But even masculine forms of brotherhood have declined within civic life. We not only increasingly “bowl alone,” but much of middle-class social activity is instrumental to advancing the competitive interests of one’s children or one’s career, as “networking” displaces casual socializing.8 We can debate the causes of the decline of associational life. Can it be due primarily to added hours in front of the television and longer commuting times (as Robert Putnam surmises), but not also because of extended family working hours? But few deny that voluntary participation in political life has withered. The upper-middle class not only increasingly isolates itself in suburban and exurban gated communities that preclude the opportunity for encounters across race and class lines. Their children no longer even run the risk of having to serve their country in battle. For a large segment of American society, the experience of the second Gulf War approximates that of Jean Baudrillard’s “simulacrum.” Those not economically “drafted” into the military make no sacrifice for the war effort. The detachment of most Americans from the risk of mutual defense is epitomized by Bush’s urging of patriotic Americans to “shop,” so as to avoid a post 9–11 recession!

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The Dialectic Between the Particular and the Universal in Expanding Solidarity Ironically, as inequality grows and solidarity wanes in the United States, one of the hottest areas of political theory in the United States focuses on solidarity across borders and peoples in regard to basic human rights and even economic justice (in regard to restructuring global economic regulatory institutions and various forms of direct aid to poor people across the globe).9 Such an emphasis strikes this writer as somewhat of a displacement of effort away from the most pressing problem of neo-liberal hegemony in the US, and thereby abroad. After all, it is Scandinavian social democrats—representing societies with the greatest levels of domestic inequality and the most extensive set of social rights—who are the most “cosmopolitan” advocates of increased foreign aid to developing societies and for the restructuring of global and regional institutions in ways that level up the world economic playing field. That is, one cannot imagine international aid agencies and non-profits absent the huge contributions of the Scandinavian social democracies (and Germany and the Netherlands). The extent of both government and private contributions to overseas development and humanitarian aid closely tracks the strength—and weakness—of the left in advanced industrial democracies. Not surprisingly, the United States consistently ranks last in terms of the generosity of their foreign aid contributions. Contemporary moral and political philosophers who analyze the concept of solidarity tend to be divided between (philosophical) pragmatic communitarians and neo-Kantian universalists. The pragmatic communitarians contend that the bonds of mutual care that characterize a solidaristic community are constituted within particular, bounded communities (states—be they national or multinational), where members share a common political culture and a strong common identity.10 To construct a “we,” these theorists argue, particular groups define themselves against an “other.” In contrast, those writing in the Rawlsian or neo-Kantian tradition claim that human cooperative endeavors can only be sustained over time if carried out under just conditions of mutual respect. Thus, Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge contend that today’s interdependent global economy morally necessitates us to extend Rawls’ “difference principle” across borders.11 The communitarian position emphasizes the exclusionary side of democratic sovereignty. The demos is self-defined, and, in the absence of a global state, must exclude others. But an overly pragmatic defense of particularism denies the universal impulse of democracy’s commitment to the equal moral worth of persons. Parochial forms of communitarianism ignore the historical reality that social movements of the excluded resort to universalist arguments when demanding to be included in the democratic polity. The egalitarian logic of democratic solidarity involves the equitable sharing of the risks, burdens, and opportunities of an interdependent society across lines of race, gender, and class. Thus, particular movements for democratic inclusion inevitably press their potential fellow citizens toward a more capacious and universal conception of equality. But, thus far, the sharing of social risk has only been achieved at the level of

From Domestic to Global Solidarity 33 the state (with some social and human rights being institutionalized on a regional level within the European Union). Transnational movements for environmental, labor, and human rights have had modest successes and, upon occasion, the international community responds generously to natural disasters (but more unevenly to massive violations of human rights, as in Rwanda, the Congo, or Darfur). The neo-Kantian position underestimates the difficulty of transforming a transnational “ought” into a regional, let alone, international “is” of effective human, labor, and environmental rights. As desirable as it may be to enhance the human capacity to grant equal respect to all fellow humans, even Kant himself acknowledged that equal moral respect does not necessarily demand equal concern for all. Kant urged us to take on our fair share of the task of improving the world.12 But the politics of grave self-sacrifice rarely builds mass movements for democracy. We are humans, not saints. Thus, the road to greater international solidarity cannot transcend the politics of the state, but, rather, must run through it. For only states that have achieved an advanced degree of economic security and solidarity are likely to help construct institutions of international governance that “level-up” global human rights and living standards. Achieving a modicum of social solidarity has been difficult enough to sustain at the level of the state. The neo-liberal pressures of late global capitalism has trimmed, if not seriously weakened, many of the social rights achieved by the labor movement and the left in advanced industrial democracies.13 Welfare state cutbacks, particularly in regard to means-tested programs, have been more severe in the United States. Thus, social theorists interested in reviving a politics of social solidarity must first comprehend why there has been such a weak domestic political response to growing inequality in the United States (as well as why these trends have generated such a weak moral and theoretical response within the academy). Only by doing so can we develop the moral and political means by which to revive democratic egalitarian politics at home. Aspirations for greater international solidarity must be grounded in transnational movements that have sufficient presence in particular states to compel these polities to adopt foreign economic and diplomatic policies that enhance global labor, environmental, and human rights conditions. Just as the moral horizons of democratic polities expanded in response to the struggles of formerly excluded social groups, so will the expansion of solidarity from the national to regional to international level occur more in response to political contestation than to abstract philosophical argument. First World citizens are more likely to support policies that enhance global justice when they are motivated by enlightened self-interest rather than by altruism. The downward pressures on global labor, human rights, and environmental standards of “race-to-the-bottom” neoliberal models of capitalist development threaten the quality of life for both “us” and “them.” Philosophical arguments can inform the ideology of movements for social justice; but it will be the particular politics of democratic polities that determine whether a more equitable world emerges.

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Localist/Communitarian Versus Global/Kantian Conceptions of Solidarity The tension between the parochial limits of mutual identity and the universalist impulses of democratic social movements is mirrored in philosophical debates about the nature and limits of fellow-feeling. Richard Rorty has argued that solidarity does not arise from any natural, universal human tendency to identify with the needs of others, but rather from a learned identity of “we-ness” that distinguishes “us” from “others.”14 Norman Geras, who defends universal conceptions of moral reasoning, says the historical record refutes Rorty’s read of Holocaust rescuers as being motivated by particular attachments to Jews as neighbors, friends, and co-workers. Rather Geras claims that studies of the rescuers demonstrate that a deontological sense of human decency, rather than particularist attachment, motivated most rescuers. They hid Jews—at great risk to their own well-being—because “it was the right thing to do.”15 The ideology and values of democratic social movements consciously cultivate broader notions of solidarity. Why else the labor movement’s slogan: “an injury to one is an injury to all” or Martin Luther King’s clarion call that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” This sense of solidarity across differences may explain the disproportionate role that people of both the religious and secular left played in the resistance to Nazism and in the rescuing of its victims. As Amy Gutmann argues in Identity and Democracy, contemporary philosophical emphasis on ascribed or cultural identity as the basis for political community ignores the reality that fellow-feeling often arises from shared moral and political values.16 Recent philosophical work on the rise of “cosmopolitan” identity overestimates how much of the world’s population lives within “hybrid” cultures. Many people across the globe are affected by transnational capital and culture. But “global subjects” tend to rank among the most affluent and educated of the world’s residents, regardless of their nation of origin. But Anthony Appiah, Amartya Sen, and other “cosmopolitans” correctly argue that global cultural interpenetration has spread notions of toleration and human rights and that such concepts have indigenous roots in cultures well beyond modern Europe.17 The moral belief in social justice has served as a powerful motivating force for people to participate in democratic political movements. The commitment to democratic equality sustained civil rights activists across racial, geographical, cultural and class lines. Neither the trade union movement nor civil rights movement could have “solved” the collective action problem of why would anyone assume the extraordinary risks of speaking out for the rights of the vulnerable absent the courage of ideologically-motivated people of faith, independent radicals, and socialists and communists. Michael Walzer’s writings on democratic community and social welfare illuminate further the tension between particular bonds and universal sentiments within both the theory and practice of democratic solidarity. Walzer holds that the extent of social provision (and the decommodification of basic needs) reflects the extent of a community’s bonds of fellow-feeling. Walzer’s essays

From Domestic to Global Solidarity 35 eloquently defend the welfare state and advocate the democratization and decentralization of its provision. They also reiterate the classic social democratic position that for each individual to have the equal opportunity to fulfill their human potential they must be assured the basic goods of care.18 Walzer’s commitment to pluralism renders him particularly sensitive to the homogenizing, universalizing aspects of classic socialist thought. He worries that a global state would eradicate the plurality of cultures and values associated with the more particular, bounded communities of states (both multi-national and national). Thus, he ostensibly rejects Kantian-inspired universal theories of justice in favor of particularist and rooted conceptions of justice. Walzer explores the policies a “religious state” (be it Muslim, Christian, or Jewish) would have to adopt in order to preserve political and civil liberties (but nonprivileged religious status) to minorities.19 Of course, theorists and activists who fall more on the “universal” side of the democratic-pluralist dilemma might question whether a state can remain fully democratic if it privileges a particular religious, ethnic, or national identity. The tension between Walzer’s commitment to the particular, rooted nature of just practices and his commitment to universal socialist values is also evident in his defense of universal health care in the United States. Walzer argues that the American willingness to provide guaranteed health insurance for the poor and elderly indicates a latent commitment to a universal right to health care.20 But what if dominant American values hold that non-impoverished adults and their families should depend upon the private market (and employment) for health provision? What if this is a relatively stable political norm? Would not Walzer (and fellow social democrats) have to appeal to a conception of justice external to dominant American understandings in order to critique this American norm? Is majority opinion always just? (And what if that opinion has been, in part, constructed by corporate power and dominant liberal, individualist ideology?). That is, in conflicted democratic (or non-democratic) societies, how would a Rortyian or Walzerian conventionalist choose between conflicting views of justice? Would they eschew all appeals to an innate or quasi-foundational belief in the equal moral worth of persons? Even Rorty’s “pragmatic” belief in the “solidarity” of minimizing human suffering and humiliation depends upon quasi-universal emotive sentiments.21 In short, the bonds of democratic social solidarity are neither innately particularist nor inherently universal. Rather, bonds of solidarity can evolve through democratic contestation toward broader horizons of fellow-feeling. This does not happen inexorably or teleologically— the fellow-feeling of national solidarity can degenerate into brutal hatred of others. Efforts to expand particular bonds of fellow-feeling involves the “democratic iterations” that Seyla Benhabib analyzes in her detailed description of the struggle to integrate citizens of Islamic faith into the countries of the European Union (without denying their right to practice their faith).22 The national identity of the French republic has been strongly tied to a concept of “laicité” that bans all forms of religious expression from the public sphere. Thus French “republicans” (including some intellectuals of North African descent) support the banning of the wearing of “headscarves” in public schools, even though

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many of the girls of North African descent who wear the headscarves do so as an expression of ethnic identity as much (or more) than as a religious observance. But given the large-scale immigration of the past forty years and the plural ethnic and religious character of the European populace, a rigid defense of an antipluralist traditional “republican” conception of the public may narrow the bonds of citizenship rather than expand them. This tension between particularist bonds of attachment and more universalist impulses toward social justice also informs much of the philosophical debate about the nature of solidarity. Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel emphasize the importance of particular communal attachments for sustaining the fellow-feeling of a just community. Taylor is the more provocative for our purposes, as while he explicitly supports social democratic policies, he insightfully argues that a “patriotic nationalism” or “civic republican” sense of common fate has informed most energetic periods of democratic reform.23 Taylor’s intuition that a sense of shared fate undergirds periods of solidaristic redistribution is evidenced by the role war has played in the expansion of the welfare state. Taylor recognizes Rawls’ principles of justice as the most rigorous intellectual heuristic in defense of a moderately redistributive welfare state (whether Rawls adequately emphasizes issues of power and democracy is a point that the late Iris Marion Young tellingly made).24 But Taylor implies that Rawls’s heuristic fails to consider the ethos of the social movements that create the political will to sustain the welfare state. James Morone historicizes Taylor’s concern in his study of American public policy. Morone argues that American public policy cycles between relatively long periods of minimalist government that uphold the dominant American ideology of individual freedom from an intrusive state, and brief, intense periods of activist state regulatory and social welfare policies. These occur in rare times of national crisis when social movements demand state action on behalf of the economic security of the many (e.g. depressions and world wars).25 In Sandel’s case, while he occasionally hints at a politics of democratic community that would necessitate both workplace participation and income redistribution, his conscious effort to break out of a “left-right paradigm” in favor of a “communitarian” versus “liberal” discourse leads him to be rather dismissive of welfare state redistributive politics as “consumerist” and “passive.”26 He counter poses to welfare state redistribution a producer-oriented politics of revitalized small business and local democracy. Sandel mounted an important epistemological and sociological critique of Rawls, as the reliance of Kantian-inspired formal theory on abstract conceptions of the self can, at times, render it both apolitical and asocial (as can certain forms of Habermas-inspired discourse theory). But Rawls readily admitted that his theoretical efforts were only trying to adumbrate, in a rigorous manner, the philosophical principles underlying liberal democracy’s political and policy commitments. In Rawls’s view, believers in the concept of liberal democracy and liberal justice are able to perform the thought experiment of “walking in another citizens’ shoes.” Sandel never adequately refuted the counter-argument of Rawls’s supporters that any advocate of political and social democracy (communitarian

From Domestic to Global Solidarity 37 or not) would likely embrace a concept of rights similar to that enunciated by Rawls.27 This “communitarian-liberal” debate subsided in the 1990s as the dominant epistemological concern of social theory shifted to post-structuralism’s critique of the very notion of a coherent self (whether that of the Kantian impartial observer or the socially constituted communal being). The post-structural turn in political theory advocated for an “agonal” politics of democratic conflict that eschewed any commitment to a fixed conception of rights. Theorists such as Wendy Brown, William Connolly, and Judith Butler argued that the concept of a stable self (even a self-reflexive one) involves the imposition of self-disciplinary norms upon an inherently “liminal self.”28 Thus, our concept of the self must be labile, fluid, and unstable and if we adhere to fixed conceptions of “rights” (or equality) we “close off” democratic possibilities. But despite their criticizing the “norming” nature of universal concepts such as “equality,” most radical democratic “post-structuralists” end up endorsing an operative politics not so far afield from those radical democrats who embrace either pragmatic, Habermasian, or neo-Kantian conceptions of identity. In short, the latent post-Marxist commitments of Connolly, Brown, and Butler lead them to an operative politics that is not far removed from that of other radical democrats. Connolly’s chapter on political economy in The Ethos of Pluralism remains one of the most articulate defenses of the need for social and economic equality as a prerequisite for a democratic pluralist society.29 And Butler’s Precarious Life utilizes post-structuralist canonical figures, such as Emmanuel Levinas, to argue that our awareness of our own vulnerability should make us empathetic to the fragility of the lives of others. The chapter calling for Jewish solidarity with the worth of Palestinian life perhaps proves that epistemological differences over the nature of the self may not map directly onto political positions—for as incoherent and as fluid as Jewish and Palestinian identity may or may not be, Butler advocates for a we-ness of fellow-feeling that the most foundationalist believer in the equal moral worth of persons could readily embrace.30

“American Exceptionalism”: the Relative Weakness of Social Solidarity at Home Thus, the extent of social solidarity is determined politically and not primarily by means of abstract philosophical argument. Political sociologists have long analyzed why social solidarity and the welfare state have been weaker in the United States than in continental Europe. There are a myriad factors involved: in contrast to monarchical Europe, democratization preceded professional bureaucratization in the United States. Thus, early, patronage-based social provision in the United States (such as Civil War pensions) associated state provision with corruption in the minds of middle-class reformers.31 The repression of the Knights of Labor in the 1880s meant that an industrial trade union movement developed much later here (the 1930s) than in Europe.32 Furthermore, the absence of proportional representation and of parliamentary government made third parties— be they labor or socialist—difficult to build. Ethnic-based political machines

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organized new immigrants into politics on the basis of ethnicity and not on the basis of class and ideology.33 Only broad, multi-class parties could contest for crucial executive offices; thus the labor movement by the New Deal pragmatically cast its lot with a nonsocialist Democratic Party. In addition, the white Democratic control of the Southern Congressional delegation, combined with the power of Congressional seniority, watered down the New Deal welfare state. Southern Democrats insisted on state-level autonomy for the administration of unemployment and disability benefits, as national standards for vigorous unemployment and social insurance programs would have cushioned the risks of labor militancy and unemployment for all workers, including black workers in the South.34 Thus, the New Deal excluded both domestic workers and farm workers (the bulk of African-American and Latino workers) from both Social Security and the national labor relations system. But beyond these crucial institutional-structural factors, the absence of a feudal legacy in the United States contributed to the dominance of liberal individualist ideology that helped weaken social solidarity in the United States.35 Early modern moral values of shared risk and fate derived from the bonds of fealty and loyalty among status groups, guilds, and the estates of medieval Europe. Solidis originally referred to the concept in Roman and feudal law of members of an estate being mutually liable for the payment of any debt taken on by a group member. As William Sewell has demonstrated, feudal concepts of shared obligation contributed to the ethos of “fraternity” (of shared brotherhood) of early labor and artisanal guilds in revolutionary France.36 This gendered conception of “fraternity” (of the mutual bonds of “free men”) expanded in a more egalitarian direction the concept of familial and status obligations. We do not choose such obligations; rather, we are born into them. Obviously the family, community, or tribe can be the site for patriarchy, exploitation, and oppression. But it can also prefigure the bonds of care that non-filial “mutual benefit societies” and other fraternal and sororal organizations work to engender in their members.37 The pervasive American ideology of laissez-faire “individual freedom” gives credence to Louis Hartz’s argument that European, post-feudal conceptions of group solidarity conflict with the American ideology of radical individualism. Thus, even our social insurance programs are couched as individually earned benefits with no redistributive elements. Most believe that we individually earn (via personal tax contributions) our Social Security and Medicare benefits, despite the reality that Social Security and Medicare are financed out of current revenues and redistributes income from the presently employed to those who no longer can labor. The Social Security “privatization” debate focused almost exclusively on whether the Social Security part of retirement income would be more securely paid if financed through an individual privately investing their contributions individually in the stock market or by receiving a payment from current tax revenue. Almost no politician mentioned that only the most affluent younger workers could afford to purchase privately the disability and life insurance policies that Social Security provides workers

From Domestic to Global Solidarity 39 of all ages. Few Americans (even academics) know that one-third of Social Security payments go to the disabled and their dependents or to the children (“survivors”) of a working parent who dies before they are sixty-five. That is, the Social Security program’s official title is “Old Age Insurance, Disability, and Survivors’ Income” (or OASDI). Most Americans cannot properly identify the precise nature of our most popular universal social insurance program (it’s not just for old people!). Through universal social insurance—the young and old, healthy and infirm— we band together to protect each other against the vicissitudes of the economy and of the life-cycle. Given the inability of mainstream politicians to articulate the rationale behind the liberal welfare state, no wonder the term “liberal” has become as much a public anathema as is “socialist” or “social democrat.” This should not come as a surprise, as the United States remains the only advanced industrialized democracy without a system of universal health care. In reality, our private health insurance schemes are not really insurance programs at all, as insurers are allowed to “cherry-pick” healthy customers by excluding from coverage those with “pre-existing conditions.” But even in the United States, when social movements have fought to expand social rights, they have appealed to conceptions of shared citizenship that moved beyond the parochial ties of ethnicity and neighborhood. Whenever a particular group has succeeded in expanding citizenship rights it has played the surrogate role of Marx’s universal class by demonstrating that its particular exclusion threatened the rights of all citizens. The civil rights movement eventually convinced a majority of Americans that the denial of rights to citizens of color violated the universal norms of citizenship. But the movement ran into mass opposition after the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act because it next moved a social democratic agenda of meaningful job training and housing and school integration. Only in 1965 did the United States legally guarantee civil and political rights to all its citizens; but it still ranks last among all advanced democracies in regard to the universal social rights it provides its citizens. In the 1930s the trade union movement in the United States rendered rights in the workplace and social insurance provision the programmatic glue of the New Deal coalition. The unions ideologically succeeded in associating dignity in the workplace with the basic rights of citizenship. Rights in the workplace have been severely eroded under neo-liberal deregulatory policies in the United States from Reagan onwards, as workers no longer even have a legal guarantee to their jobs if they strike. With the National Labor Relations Board controlled by anti-labor zealots, anti-union corporations and union-busting law firms effectively make American workers the only citizens of a democratic state that neither have an effective right to strike or to form a union at a previously unorganized work site. An under-recognized element of American exceptionalism is the relative absence, except for the Civil War and World War II, of wars that mobilized the entire nation. The revolutionary republican tradition is identified in continental Europe with patriotism and the defeat of fascism. Only in the United States is the

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left viewed as unpatriotic. This is, in part, due to exceptional circumstances— along with the Australian Labor and Italian Socialist parties, the Debsian Socialist Party courageously opposed World War I. The Communist Party’s hegemony on the American left from 1935–1956 meant that the American left was popularly identified with the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the anti-Vietnam war movement’s opposition to the draft (in order to stop an endless stream of conscripts) engendered a legacy of left opposition to universal service. Except for the United Kingdom and Canada, the global left supports universal service (with, of course, non-military alternatives to conscientious objectors). This opposition in the United States has produced an Iraq war characterized by a total absence of shared national sacrifice and a de facto “economic” draft. (Would we be in Iraq if the children of the middle class were subject to the draft and could not readily avoid service?) But it is precisely the sense of common sacrifice in war that has provided the moral underpinning for the expansion of the welfare state. Ira Katznelson’s recent work demonstrates how the GI Bill and federally subsidized home mortgage system after World War II would have been unimaginable absent the sense of entitlement and desire for equal citizenship on the part of returning GIs.38 As Theda Skocpol notes, the American Legion provided the lobbying backbone for the GI Bill—a massive federal welfare program guaranteeing fully-subsidized university education to the majority of men in their twenties and thirties.39 The small number of places in historically Black institutions, combined with the paucity of integrated universities and colleges, meant the GI Bill did not cover most African-American men. And just as African-Americans began to secure good unionized industrial jobs in the high-wage, high-productivity industrial economy, this “Fordist”40 model went into crisis. The industries in which African-Americans (mostly men) had gained good jobs after the Great Migration from the South would massively shed labor from 1970 onwards (e.g. steel, auto, chemicals, and rubber).41 Successful movements for the extension of democratic rights only achieve hegemonic political status through the successful implementation of a “governing program” of economic redistribution and development.42 “Fordist” industrial growth and Keynesian welfare state policies provided such a “governing model” for the American liberal and European social democratic left from 1947–1973. But since 1973 the uneven growth of an information and finance-driven global capitalism has placed downward pressure on the living standards of those who do not have the “symbolic-manipulative” skills of the professional-managerial class and skilled technological workers (or the university credentialization of the middle class of civil servants, teachers, and retail service managers). The mild redistribution of life opportunities via the welfare state and GI Bill depended on a certain degree of middle-class taxpayers’ solidarity with the working class and poor. In the Great Depression the vast majority of income earners experienced economic vulnerability; thus, the polity proved open to an expansion of state provision. In the mass prosperity of the 1960s, sufficient numbers of a confident white middle class supported the development of social programs aimed at incorporating the poor. But in the past thirty-five years of

From Domestic to Global Solidarity 41 uneven growth and stagnant real personal incomes, the working and middle strata feel that economic insecurity is only a pink slip away. The right has succeeded in convincing many white insecure workers (particularly men) that their insecurity is largely due to competition from overseas labor, new immigrants, and (via affirmative action) workers of color.43 The right’s narrative identifies the causes of economic stagnation with overly generous public expenditure on the poor and excessive state economic regulation (even though the vast majority of social welfare spending goes to popular universal social insurance programs). If there is to be a new era of solidaristic public policy it may result from the baby-boom generation experiencing the financial burdens of simultaneously paying for their children’s college, their own family health care, and elder care for their parents. But these human needs are likely to be unequally met through ad hoc, private arrangements, with the needs of the bottom-half of our society being ill-met. This will be the likely policy outcome unless the left can convince a majority that progressive taxation, prudent defense cuts, and investment in infrastructure and job-training can sustain sufficient economic growth to finance the public expenditure needed to decommodify the provision of care. Most social scientists concur that universal social insurance programs in regard to old age pensions, health care, unemployment, disability, and child support have been “trimmed”—but not gutted—in most advanced industrial polities (with the notable exception being the more vulnerable means-tested programs in regard to child support in the United States and United Kingdom).44 The difficulty French and German policy elites (of both the right and center-left) have had in expanding working hours, pushing back the retirement age, deregulating youth employment, and increasing university fees (to take but a few examples) demonstrates the depth of Western Europe’s commitment to a “social market” economy. Yet, given growing competition in the industrial sector from Eastern Europe, any further expansion of the welfare state in Western Europe may be off the political agenda. The United States and the United Kingdom are the nations in which the Protestant work ethic and laissez-faire doctrine outweighed more solidaristic social Christian and social democratic conceptions of citizenship. Means-tested provision of child support (aka, “welfare”) and health care (aka, Medicaid) has been vulnerable to hostility from working-class adults whose income places them just above the income eligibility lines for such programs. The resulting rise of “workfare” in both countries (and cuts in eligibility for Food Stamps and Medicaid) has rendered the lives of the working poor and their children more precarious. Even if women leave workfare and find full employment, they rarely make up in increased income the child care and medical benefits they usually lose when entering the paid labor force.45 Our society’s inability to comprehend the emotional and financial stress that poor families confront in raising children (whether there is a parent full-time in the workforce or not) indicates how weak the bonds of solidarity are in the United States. We talk of “leaving no child behind”; yet our society tolerates a system of federalism that insures that the most disadvantaged children attend the least-well funded schools with the poorest-paid and least experienced teachers. As feminist theorists from Joan

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Tronto onwards have argued, unless societies make a universal commitment to the particular needs of “care” for those dependent upon others, a democratic society will not be characterized by the equal respect of social solidarity.46

The Internationalist Logic (and Limits) of Movements for Social Solidarity In a nation where there is little political pressure to bridge the gap between rich and poor, it is not surprising that policy makers have done nothing to stop the genocide in Darfur. Most readers of the United States press barely know that four million people have died in the decade-long civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (The New York Times recently reported that onethousand-two-hundred-and-fifty children die every week in the Congo from diseases that are controlled in equally destitute countries not experiencing civil war.)47 As Lula Inacio da Silva stated in a recent UN General Assembly address, the UN Millennium anti-global poverty goals contend that $50 billion a year of expenditure could eliminate global hunger.48 These funds could readily be raised if the United States reached the Millennium goal of devoting 0.7 percent (currently 0.2 percent) of its GDP to global anti-poverty and development expenditure. These sad realities speak to the present limits of global solidarity. These “realist” constraints do not deny our humanitarian obligations to those outside our polity. But it does behoove us to move beyond a philosophical justification of such obligations toward a viable political strategy for expanding the horizons of solidarity. The road to greater domestic solidarity may well be the road to greater international solidarity. Scandinavia has the best record on humanitarian assistance and effective economic aid to the developing world. The generous private non-profit response to some international disasters demonstrates that the moral responsibility to aid those in dire need already has some purchase among residents of the United States. But even fulfilling this minimal bond of solidarity—to alleviate the extreme duress of mass starvation or genocide—would necessitate a transformation of American political culture and policy. Existing United States foreign and economic policy is far more damaging to global humanitarian interests than is the weakness of humanitarian impulses among the rank-and-file citizenry. Given the hegemonic role of the United States in global economic and military affairs, the greatest blow for global justice that American citizens can strike would be to transform (even modestly) United States government policies. The United States government signing and implementing the Kyoto Accords on greenhouse gases and supporting and enforcing labor and human rights provisions within international trade agreements would radically transform the prospects for greater global equity. In addition, the United States government’s willingness to subject its armed forces to true international control would greatly enhance the possibilities for multi-lateral humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping in Darfur, southern Lebanon, or on a future Israeli-Palestinian border. Current global mistrust of United States military unilateralism precludes the United States—the one nation with a military

From Domestic to Global Solidarity 43 that has global logistical capacities—from coordinating international humanitarian intervention. And the United States’ (and European Union’s) unconscionable protectionism of agribusiness has destroyed the lives of small farmers across the globe, as has our refusal to write-off the debt burden that necessitates developing nations to produce for export rather than to meet domestic needs. A major reason for the fourfold increase in annual undocumented immigration from Mexico since 1994 has been NAFTA’s destruction of Mexican small farmers. Radical democrats in the OECD countries must fight for trade, human rights, and environmental policies that would raise global living standards—rather than perpetuate the race-to-the-bottom mode of global capitalist development. But prudential arguments about the harm such policies bring to the living standards of our fellow citizens are more likely to influence United States global development policies than are abstract arguments about global distributive justice. The emerging “global civil society” of transnational social movements helps raise the visibility of transnational issues. But absent social movements and political parties that can transform the domestic politics of major economic and strategic actors, the gap between the normative aims of transnational society, and global political realities will remain chasm-like. Too often those arguing for the transformation of institutions of global governance forget that international regulatory institutions (be they the International Court of Justice, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, or the Kyoto Accords) are heavily influenced by the policies of the most powerful states. The struggle for a more internationalist and egalitarian polity in the United States will partly turn on the rebirth of a dynamic, internationalist American trade union movement. Unions remain one of the only social institutions in the United States that bring people together across lines of race and national origin. The struggle to expand the right of citizenship to all working people in the United States and the European Union will be a make-or-break issue for the future of international solidarity. In the nation with the allegedly strongest “work ethic,” only on the margins of the American left does one hear the argument that if one contributes to the labor of society one must have full voice in the decisions that govern such labor. The only truly democratic position in the current immigration debate is that all those who labor in our economy should have full citizenship rights for themselves and their immediate families. If capital can roam the globe for the greatest return, then labor should have the same right. If a nation wishes to limit immigration, it is incumbent upon that polity to promote foreign economic, labor, and human rights policies that limit “the push” factor of immigration from developing nations. And if domestic labor—both immigrant and non-immigrant—has a true right to organize (and if antidiscrimination ordinances are enforced in regard to discrimination by employers against young black males), then the cost of service labor will be driven up sufficiently that such jobs will be more attractive to native-born citizens and corporations will have to increase the efficiency of such labor. Doing so would limit the “pull” factor of the current insatiable demand for cheap, sweated labor (in the allegedly richest nation in the world!).

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Whether the right to work anywhere within the European Union will remain a core principle of an expanded European Union remains to be seen. Seven years from now immigration restrictions among the current twenty-seven EU members are to be eliminated. But thus far only three EU members have eliminated all internal-EU immigration controls. An even larger issue is how European society will deal with growing immigration from North Africa. If the EU opts for more restrictive immigration policies, will it enact foreign economic policies that facilitate equitable economic development in Africa? The sexual and cultural practices of new immigrant groups (as well as long-resident non-liberal communities) will continually revisit the tension within “liberal democracy” between liberty and equality. Only those who fall heavily on the particularist side of this dilemma would uphold clitorectomy and other clearly patriarchal practices (such as bridal dowries) as consonant with the rights of democratic citizens.49 Seyla Benhabib and Carol Gould believe that “democratic dialogue” can aid immigrant communities in reconfiguring these “rites of passage” and other traditions in ways that respect liberal democratic norms. One would hope so—but if they do not, then once again a liberal democratic polity will have to decide how liberal it should be toward non-liberal practices. Earlier, I argued that posing a stark antinomy between particularist, communitarian solidarity, and democratic universalism is historically inaccurate, when judged against the behavior of democratic social movements for incorporation. Likewise, measures do exist for somewhat transcending the particularuniversalist tension in international obligations. First, even a hard-bitten “realist” might recognize that failed polities—states that cannot sustain a bare minimum of physical and economic security for their citizens—are breeding grounds for terrorism and regional conflict. This is not to justify (disastrous and ineffectual) imperial efforts at “nation-building.” Rather, first world nations should curtail the international arms trade and corrupt corporate practices that make the creation of stable states in the developing world more difficult. Second, liberal, Keynesian-informed economists (and capitalists) such as Felix Rohatyn, Joe Stiglitz, and George Soros advocate global regulation of financial speculation and the creation of global regulatory institutions that establish a universal floor under labor, environmental, and living standards.50 These “enlightened capitalists” comprehend the inherent stagnationist logic to the neo-liberal “Washington Consensus” of the IMF. Much of the impetus for the post-World War II expansion of the welfare state came from elite recognition that the erosion of workingclass purchasing power contributed to the Great Depression. Perhaps a similar dynamic will facilitate a coalition between global trade union and human rights activists and progressive elements of global corporate elites. Yet powerful domestic interests block the development of such practices, particularly in regard to more equitable trade policy. Both agri-business and small farmers have been the major interests preventing the EU and United States from abandoning agricultural subsidies and opening their markets further to third world agricultural products. Furthermore, the growing import of the insurance, banking, information, and entertainment industries in advanced industrial countries militates against a world trade and investment regime that would

From Domestic to Global Solidarity 45 protect infant industries in these sectors in the developing world. Yet there are already examples of successful statist development, where strong state guidance of capitalist development (particularly in regard to the role foreign capital played within national development strategies) yielded relatively egalitarian increases in mass living standards. Cold War fears of North Korean and mainland Chinese communism motivated United States policy makers to allow South Korea and Taiwan to pursue land reform, protectionist, and state-capitalist development strategies (strategies we subverted at great human cost in Mossadegh’s Iran, Arbenz’s Guatemala, and Allende’s Chile). Such policies enabled these nations to emerge from their protectionist cocoons to compete effectively against global transnational capital. International human and labor rights theorists sometimes romanticize the extent of political and economic integration within the EU. But the EU’s judicial, economic, and social regulatory institutions have somewhat eroded national sovereignty and pushed member states’ social policies (e.g. gays and lesbians serving in the armed forces) in relatively enlightened directions. The EU’s social compact’s commitment to redistributive aid for its least developed regions in the 1970s and 1980s helped raise the living standards of the newest and least affluent members. Such policies undoubtedly improved life opportunities for Irish, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, and southern Italian citizens. Of course, whether transnational union cooperation will force the European Union to raise living and labor standards among its newest members in Eastern Europe (as well as limit the deindustrialization of Western Europe) remains an open question. But the German and Scandinavian labor movements certainly understand that their future economic well-being depends on the raising of labor, environmental, and living standards in newer member-states. The European Union experience demonstrates the potential of democratic regional integration for raising living, labor, and human rights standards in Latin and Central America, Asia, and Africa. If the core argument of this chapter is correct, then the future of global social solidarity rests considerably upon the future of social solidarity in the United States. The United States remains not only the global military hegemon, but its foreign policy will be a key valence factor in the future development of international regulatory regimes governing labor, investment, trade, human rights, and the environment. Thus, reconstructing a democratic politics of social solidarity in the United States is the greatest contribution American citizens can make to the struggle for a more democratic and equitable world.

3

Post-Structuralist Political Theory Living in an Unreal World—Where’s You? Me? Agency?

Introduction: The Post-Structuralist Turn in Political Theory The economic and policy dilemmas posed for the welfare state by globalization robbed American liberalism and European social democracy of the political hegemony they held from the mid-1960s into the late 1970s. One can make a strong argument that neither political tendency has yet to discover a new material and policy basis for a majoritarian politics. Yet, neither have advocates of a “postmodern agonal politics” or a radical “politics of difference”– both of which assume the demise of a liberal or social democratic politics—developed a public philosophy and political strategy that can underpin a new “post-material” majoritarian politics. Radical democratic theory and practice today need not choose between the false antinomy of universality versus particularism, but must reconceptualize a politics that creates solidarity across difference. The “universal” project of achieving civil, political, and social rights has not been transcended by “difference,” but remains a prerequisite for a democratic polity that values both pluralism and social equality. Nor have “material” politics been transcended by the “qualitative” demands of race, gender, and sexual emancipation. For absent the social right of each individual to fulfill his or her human potential, other forms of emancipation that are not solely materially-based cannot be fully achieved. The crisis of left theory and practice is not limited to the spheres of policy and political economy. Only in the past few years has mainstream public discourse in the United States begun to focus on social inequality and its adverse effects on political democracy. Unlike the 1960s and 1970s, when political theory addressed issues of workplace democracy and inequality, over the past thirty years, political theorists have largely been consumed by intellectual debates in regard to questions of subjectivity, identity, and difference. Few theorists since have highlighted the corrosive effects growing economic inequality has had upon political democracy. In fact, scholars of American politics—much more than “engaged” political theorists—provided the major impetus for the (belated) report of the American Political Science Association on this very topic.1 In fact, ever since post-structuralism’s ideas first took hold within political theory in the early 1980s, it has been the dominant mode of analysis for feminist and radical political theorists. Political theory imported from deconstruction’s

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mode of reading literary texts Jacques Derrida’s argument as to the inherently unstable relationship between “signifier” (the linguistic sign) and “signified” (the object or idea that is alluded to by the “signifier”). According to Derrida, “meaning” inevitably includes both “identity” (what is) and “différance” (what is not). Thus, according to the post-structuralist canon, any attempt to “fix” meaning will yield repressive attempts to eliminate the ineluctable “other,” or “excess,” of human reality. To avoid the illegitimate elimination of the “play” of difference, post-structuralist influenced political theory rejects the “binary oppositions” that allegedly ground Western philosophy: subject-object; man-woman; reality-appearance; reason-emotion; and speech-writing. In this view, the very effort of representation and causal analysis excludes and devalues the “inferior” part of the binary term that is traditionally denigrated as being irrational or emotional.2 Given the absence of a stable referential relation between subject and object, post-structuralists argue that social theory should focus upon the ways in which subjects are “constructed” by discourse. Post-structuralist theorists frequently draw upon Michel Foucault’s concept of “power-knowledge” discourses to examine how subjects are “produced” by discourse. While Foucault’s earlier “archaeological” work on how epistemes (or systems of thought) “norm” and “exclude” has influenced some post-structuralist theoretical work, it is his later “genealogical” analysis of power as “productive” and “enabling” (rather than as primarily coercive) that has most influenced post-structuralism’s critique of “agency.”3 As Judith Butler holds, the conception of a coherent, rational, human individual who exercises conscious agency ignores the reality that human identities are continually being reconfigured through “performative,” “selfinscriptions” of dominant norms and discourses.4 Post-structuralism represents both a sensibility in regard to social inquiry and a normative critique of modernity. According to post-structuralism, the enlightenment’s search for rational understanding that could ameliorate the human condition engendered ideological or false “grand narratives” of history, which are based on “essentialist,” “universal,” and “fixed” conceptions of human nature. Drawing upon Jean Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, poststructuralists reject the enlightenment’s search for “totalizing” theories that offer “universal” narratives of human motivation and experience, whether the narrative be that of liberalism or Marxism.5 Self-defined “postmodernists” may not as heavily utilize “post-structuralism’s” philosophical apparatus to interpret a “fragmented” and “decentered” world that moves beyond the enlightenment’s faith in the progress of reason. Drawing again upon Foucault, many poststructuralist theorists claim that these “grand narratives” underpinned the enlightenment’s efforts to “normalize” human beings through the bureaucratic and repressive institutions of “governance” (e.g. both state and non-state institutions, such as the asylum and the hospital) that “categorize” human beings.6 Perhaps the greatest contribution of post-structuralist thought to social theory has been its critique of the Marxist structuralist effort to “read off” social consciousness from the “objective” location of “agents” within a social system. This critique has had the felicitous effect of enabling radical theorists to better

Post-Structuralist Political Theory 49 comprehend the independent influence upon human endeavor of culture, discourse, and ideology, as well as the “norming” role that social institutions, including the helping professions, frequently play within society.7 This analysis sees “difference” and “otherness”—of race, gender, sexual orientation, and national identity—as not simply an add-on to class analysis. Rather, as social relationships of relatively autonomous import, the theoretical focus on race and gender has had some salutary affects upon political practice. The insistence of feminism that the public/private distinction is not “natural,” but rather socially constructed, has enhanced our understanding of the politics of care and childrearing. Only the most traditional of Marxists and social democrats assert that class politics should be the sole—or even privileged—emancipatory project. But the post-structuralist “deconstruction” of the concepts of human subjectivity and agency have posed new intellectual barriers to coherent theorizing about the activity of real human beings. As Susan Hekman’s points out, in Identity Politics, many feminist and “radical” theorists embrace the post-structuralist orthodoxy that the concepts of “the subject” and “agency” are “fictive universals” that negate the role that the “repressed other” plays within “fragmented selves.” According to this by-now standard post-structuralist narrative, coherent subjects do not exist and agency is a fictive “norm” imposed upon individuals by “disciplinary institutions.” Rather, human actors are “subject-positions” that struggle, in a Sispyhean manner, to “fix” identities and institutions that are inherently unstable.8 Drawing upon Foucault, these theorists imply that any recognition by the state of groups, or even state-regulation of economic or political behavior, “norms” individuals through the “discursive” constitution of “biopower.”9 That is, the state, through bureaucratic and statistical classifications tries to “norm” citizens into coherent identities. As if to affirm Michael Walzer’s view that Foucauldian analysis yields a political sensibility of resigned resistance (resistance inevitably involves only a “rearranging of the bars on the cage” of modern institutions), post-structuralist’s most influential theorist, Judith Butler, counsels a strategy of “resistance” grounded upon the “ironic” transmutation of the “performative” roles that power-knowledge discourses “norm” upon us.10 Few post-structuralists actually empirically investigate whether individuals who self-consciously struggle for a transformation of their life conditions conceive of themselves as “fictive constructs.” And as James Glass contends in his study of diagnosed schizophrenics, those who actually experience a “split self” describe the experience, in their most lucid moments, to be one of incredible pain and disorientation.11 Most human beings strive for a coherent narrative sense of their self (and of life possibilities); and social movements and political groups also endeavor to construct a sense of shared experience and common goals (as well as awareness of diversity and difference that cross-cuts these commonalities). Post-structuralist theory is not only critical of liberal conceptions of a choosing self; it also asserts that the “rights” that protect such choice serve to “norm” individuals rather than protect their freedom. “Rights” in the reading of prominent post-structuralist political theorists neither empower nor constrain individuals; they only regulate and limit the actions the self may (fictively?)

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“choose.”12 In addition, as Wendy Brown argues in States of Injury, the discourse of “rights” is often used by advocates of “identity politics” to “fix and homogenize” group identity rather than to enable the fluid nature of subjectivity. Hence, some advocates of political empowerment for women, gays and lesbians, and communities of color (even those influenced by post-structuralist theory) take issue with Wendy Brown’s devaluing of identity politics as a politics of “ressentiment.”13 Nor would feminist and anti-racist activists necessarily be suspicious of newly won rights (such as legislation against sexual or racial harassment) as new forms of state-enforced “norming.”14 Do legally-enforceable policies against domestic violence, sexual harassment, or in favor of civil union fail to increase the freedom of women, people of color, and gays and lesbians? Or should such policies, which are seen as “gains” by most movement activists, be derided as “naively” conforming to new modes of state “bio-power” and “social norming”? Yet this seeming inability to distinguish between repressive and democratic state policies does not preclude post-structuralist-influenced theorists from claiming to advance an “emancipatory” political strategy. The most influential American post-structuralist political theorists (Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, and William Connolly) believe in an “agonal” struggle among “fluid” selves to construct an emancipatory political system in which “difference” is no longer repressed by either hegemonic or insurgent group identities.15 Such post-structuralist critiques of “the subject” preclude not only a politics of group identity and organizational affiliation, but also a world in which political actors have (limited, but real) agency. Theories of human ontology and epistemology must have some connection to the “reflective equilibrium” of how contemporary human beings conceive of themselves, if they are to be plausible (unless one assumes mass “false-consciousness” and self-delusion). If actual human beings internalized the “post-structuralist” conception of the “decentered self” they could no longer believe in the conception of agency and choice they hold to in everyday life. That is, if all institutions are “discursively constructed” and all “discourse” is subject to the indetermination of “différance” (the inevitable interpretive gap between the linguistic “signifier” and the object “signified”) then an actor has no way to assess the likely consequences of his or her action—or that their communicative efforts will be understood by others. Furthermore, if “one” cannot even be certain that “one” is a coherent subject, then political choice and action must be an inherently futile, random, and incoherent project. Post-structuralist theorists also claim that their critique of grand historical “meta-narratives”—narratives often grounded in some allegedly inherent human nature—has helped eliminate teleological and eschatological myths from social theory. But the popular loss of faith in historical meta-narratives (if not the “end of history” itself) derives more from the crisis of social democracy and the collapse of authoritarian communism than it does from post-structuralism’s critique of grand social theory. This popular loss of hope in utopia—of a world more attractive—has its costs, as well as its cautionary benefits.16 Human beings rarely struggle for a better world if they believe that all emancipatory visions (even sober, reformist ones) inexorably result in “totalizing” disasters.

Post-Structuralist Political Theory 51 Post-structuralism’s obsessive focus on “discourse” precludes it from dealing with a traditional (and still relevant) question of radical social theory: who will fight for social justice and why—and what are feasible roads to democratic reform? Postmodernism’s conscious dismissal of questions of human agency and group dynamics in the name of a radical “subjectivity” of “de-centeredness” cannot explain why most human beings believe that they are morally responsible actors. Nor can post-structuralist theory explain the self-conscious strategic choices both individuals and groups make as political and social actors. Once social and political theory abandons all analysis of how political, economic, and cultural institutions constrain—and also shape—the possibilities for social transformation, then theory is no longer of use to citizens engaged in political practice. That most radicals no longer possess the smug self-confidence that they represent the inexorable forces of progress has led to a more open and pluralist left. And the post-structuralist turn in theory has contributed to radical theorists comprehending that there is no utopian road beyond human plurality and, thus, conflict and politics.17 But abandoning faith in an inexorable telos of history should not be equated with abolishing the need to analyze the possibilities for (and challenges to) moving society in a democratic and egalitarian direction. Post-structuralist theory strongly implies that all prior radical democrats rest their commitment to democracy upon false “foundational moral truths”—based upon alleged “irrefutable facts,” or a priori logic, or anthro-historically derived beliefs about trans-historical human characteristics. Such philosophical “metanarratives” yield a dogmatic faith in teleological historical development. But one can comprehend that the democratic belief in the equal moral worth of citizens is “socially constructed” (and not transcendentally or divinely justified) absent any overarching epistemological or metaphysical apparatus. But whatever the philosophical sources of one’s democratic beliefs, as Seyla Benhabib has insightfully argued, a democratic society cannot sustain solidarity among “concrete others” (i.e. particular individuals or groups) absent the (socially-developed) ability of citizens to reason from the position of a “generalizable other” (i.e. from the perspective of a shared humanity).18 Democratic citizens must develop the capacity for empathy across particular group identities if democratic politics is not to degenerate into competition among groups with radically unequal resources and power—a quotidian version of Nietzsche’s “will-to-power.” Celebrants of such an “open struggle for ethical definition” as the essence of a “nonfoundational democratic politics” forget Nietzsche’s insight that victory almost always goes to “the powerful,” unless the weak ally together (whether under the banner of Christianity, Marxism, or radical democracy).19 The post-structuralist-inspired critique of the left’s traditional focus on class identity, its inordinate faith in rationality, and its insensitivity to diversity and difference has had the salutary effect of deepening the left’s concern with difference, discourse, and identity. But too often this “cutting-edge” theory has associated concern for equality with the “homogenizing” tendencies of a repressive and universalizing “enlightenment” paradigm.20 In contrast, democraticallyoriented feminists such as Martha Nussbaum, Martha Minow, and Susan Okin worked to link democracy’s commitment to equality with feminism’s insight

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that gender (and other social) differences sometimes necessitate “differential treatment” before the law in order that every individual possesses the equal opportunity to achieve one’s life plans or potential.21 Thus, “difference” and “equality” need not be radically juxtaposed. To put it starkly: allegedly “anti-establishment” political theorists have failed to make a public dent against the mass media’s near-universal proclamation that “there is no alternative” to deregulated capitalism as a form of efficient economic organization. Students in advanced political theory classes often learn to articulate the value of “diversity” for a democratic polity or even to “deconstruct” the fictitious “coherent subject”; yet few could advance an elementary critique of the ludicrous contemporary orthodoxy that “the market equals democracy.” As Karl Polanyi taught long ago, the market is not natural; it is created and sustained by state regulation—its origins often lie with the brutal use of force by the state. The rise of “free wage labor” in Europe involved not only state-funded imperial subjugation of indigenous and African labor, but also the uprooting of European peasants from the land in order to promote commercial agriculture, thus creating a pool of “free wage labor” dependent upon capitalists for employment.22 The mantra of “capitalism equals democracy” and “an expanding middle class brings democracy” is revealed as more myth than reality by the emergence of one-party “Marxist-Leninist” capitalism in China and Vietnam. Long forgotten seems to be the historical and sociological scholarship that demonstrated the central role working-class parties and trade unions played in the rise of democracy—in contrast to a politically timid bourgeoisie which often sided with repressive regimes when they found their class prerogatives threatened by democratic unrest.23

How “Post” is “Postmodernism”? Post-structuralism’s focus upon “discursive practices” and its reading of human experience as a “text” reflects, in rather mimetic fashion, the central role the commodification of cultural images plays in a late capitalist economy characterized by the space-time compression of global telecommunications and computerization. But is late capitalism so postmodern that only postmodern analysis (and anti-foundational ethics) can best comprehend that society’s workings? David Harvey, Alex Callincoss, and Frederic Jameson have all explored the material basis for the rise of postmodern consciousness.24 And such iconic poststructuralist theorists as Jean Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard claim that poststructuralist theories of fragmentation and de-situated agency reflects “postmodern capitalism’s” conflation of image and reality and compression of space and time.25 But is the “postmodern” era a new historical epoch or an accentuation of tendencies inherent to capitalist political, economic, and cultural development? On the theoretical plane, most post-structuralist insights are derivative of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s respective reactions to late nineteenth-century modernity. These insights, then and now, reflect the fragmented, ephemeral, “creative destruction” of capitalist modernity, whether experienced in the height

Post-Structuralist Political Theory 53 of industrial capitalism (1870–1930), which witnessed the rise of the steel, chemical, and then auto industry and the disruption of revolution, war, and depression or the “post-Fordist” information, finance, and telecommunications revolution which has restructured, since the mid-1970s, the post-World War II welfare state of industrial, “monopoly” capitalism. Capitalism is a social order that has undergone recurrent social restructuring, from the transformation from agrarian to industrial society and from mass industrial production to computerization and mass communications. Such transformations create insecurity and “de-centeredness” for many, while “rooting” new, more prosperous communities. In addition, capitalism continually “commodifies” new forms of production. The frenetic nature of this “creative destruction” is often indirectly reflected in new forms of cultural creation. Thus, “modernism’s” early twentieth-century aesthetic highpoint—Cubism’s and Dada’s appropriation of geometry and montage—queried the “auratic” originality of artistic production. These art forms prefigured “postmodernism’s” challenging of “representational” art’s efforts to represent a “signified” beyond the surface of the “signifier” itself.26 Contemporary postmodernism evinces less of modernism’s romantic identification with the communally pre-modern. Rather, contemporary “communitarians”—who share postmodernism’s critique of the rational, atomized subject, but who offer the alternative of a situated, communally-constructed “self”—unconsciously emulate the romantic longing for traditional, static communities. But, certainly, the post-structuralist thematic of the self as plural, heterogeneous, and constituted by power is not a late twentieth-century “postmodern” invention. Well aware of this, Michel Foucault self-identified as a “left Nietzschean” engaged in concrete genealogies of the fictive, unified self that Nietzsche had philosophically deconstructed in the late nineteenth century. Any cursory reading of Nietzsche reminds us that the argument that knowledge itself is an insidious practice of power did not first emerge among disillusioned, structuralist Marxists in the cafes of post-1968 Paris. While postmodernism may represent the “ironic” abandonment of aesthetic modernism’s anxiety about the loss of coherence and totality, the self-reflexive ambiguity and fears of dehumanization manifest in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernist art and literature prefigures much of the “postmodern” sensibility. Nor is it strictly a contemporary “postmodern” sensibility to ask whether human experience can be adequately represented in time and space. Derrida readily admits that his concept of “différance” is prefigured by Heidegger’s critique of Plato’s reduction of the plurality of reality into a static conception of Being. Just as Heidigger accused Plato’s “forms” of erroneously attempting to fix the fluidity of being, so Derrida derides “metaphysical presence” as an attempt to achieve a “fixed signified” instead of confronting the “reality” of the endless play of “textual” signifiers. The inexorable play of “différance” among linguistic “signifiers” is ontologically prior to both presence and absence, according to Derrida. Meaning can never be fixed.27 Thus, both modernist and postmodernist aesthetics can be (somewhat reductively) read as a reaction to the “creative destruction” of capitalist crisis and

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restructuring.28 Even prior to the “modernist” crisis of 1890–1930, the political and economic instability of the revolutionary 1840s engendered Marx’s felicitous phrasing of the revolutionary nature of capitalist commodification as “all that is solid melts into air.”29 Marshall Berman makes a forceful case that the major modernist aesthetic and ethical dilemmas are laid out as early as the work of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, and Manet.30 Perry Anderson criticizes Berman for locating the aesthetic exemplars of this sensibility of radical contingency, and resultant anxiety, in bourgeois literature as early as the 1840s; Anderson claims that the modernism of the late nineteenth-century “fin de siècle” more radically breaks with bourgeois norms of progress and rationality.31 But in either case, many of the allegedly “revolutionary” themes of contemporary postmodern analysis manifested themselves culturally in earlier periods of rapid capitalist social transformation. David Harvey also locates throughout capitalism tendencies toward speed-up of production, space-time compression, rampant insecurity, and destruction of traditional communities via commodification (tendencies, of course, noted in Marx’s canonical texts). Harvey strongly implies that “postmodernity” may be neither new nor “post-capitalist.” As Harvey writes, “The only secure thing about capitalist modernity is its insecurity.”32 Might the continuous operation of the Marxian “laws of motion of capital”—growth in real value dependent upon the commodification of living labor and constant technological and organizational innovation—remain central to “postmodern” capitalism. Should we then draw the dismissive conclusion that as for theories heralding a distinct “postmodern” epoch of late capitalism: “plus ca change, plus c’est la mème chose?” A more temperate answer, offered below, is that late capitalism is characterized by radical and “new” structural and cultural characteristics brought about by computerization, telecommunication, the rapid and expansive circulation of finance capital, and a global “infotainment” culture. In the advanced capitalist nations, the move from industrial to finance-driven capital (in which manufacturing remains a critical component, but employs a smaller percentage of the labor force than under post-World War II Fordism) generates greater inequality in the labor market. The bottom-third working predominantly in the service sector (and experiencing bouts of under-and-unemployment) live precarious existences, and greater instability visits the middle-third of society, who can find fewer long-term forms of employment with strong pension and health benefits. But these new forms of commercial endeavor are institutionalized within the crucial continuities of a capitalist mode of production. Lyotard and Baudrillard put forth a strong case for conceiving of postmodern capitalist culture as an economy of image-making. They both contend that the postmodern epoch transcends industrial production via the commodification of images and the “depthlessness” of the surface of postmodern human relationships.33 But such a portrayal is too stark; the production of images has not supplanted the production of material use-values as the dominant form of capitalist production (and images themselves are “material” forms of production sold in the capitalist market). No doubt video games, “virtual reality,” and cyberspace are new forms of experience that compress and dislocate linear, physical conceptions

Post-Structuralist Political Theory 55 of time and space. But while late capitalist “infotainment” production, at times, radically disjoins design and marketing (“symbolic manipulation”) from actual physical production (microchips designed in Silicon Valley while produced in Malaysia and the Philippines), the outsourcing of symbolic manipulation to software engineers in India and South Korea is rapidly breaking down this distinction. But Lyotard’s and Derrida’s aestheticization of all reality equates not only philosophical texts with literary texts, but also treats material phenomenon as strictly texts read by the human mind. This tendency among post-structuralist influenced theorists leads them to downplay the structural constraints that systems of production—not only material, but also cultural and ideological— place upon human subjects. It also downplays the possibility for human communication, inter-subjectivity, and collective action. For Lyotard, the only social bond is linguistic; inter-subjective language does not yield a shared linguistic community, but an indeterminate number of language games. Yet, if reality consists solely of perpetually shifting fragments of failed representations, how can there be any communication, yet alone the comprehension of commands?34 If inter-subjective communication is impossible, then why and how do we write journal articles for our (admittedly small) intellectual communities? One need not be a Weberian to realize that “legitimate rule” depends more on the power to command—authority—than it does brute force. Such rules are rarely constructed in a truly democratic manner, as the unequal access to educational, social, and cultural capital decreases the possibility of democratic discourse among relatively well-informed equals. Yet much of the social glue that coheres contemporary societies remains conscious, shared human belief in communal norms and values—often ones that are as pre-modern (religious and ethnic conceptions of solidarity), as they are postmodern. The role of ideology as a form of communicative coherence has not withered away—nor has the material and ideological power of the state and of educational and legal systems. The social world in which we live is simply not as fragmented and de-situated as poststructural-influenced academics believe. In fact, the tight knit and cohesive nature of post-structural-influenced academic communities implicitly affirms philosophically “pragmatic” and communitarian conceptions of meaning more than they do post-structuralist theories of communicative fragmentation. Thus, societies remain characterized by structural economic, cultural, and political constraints that are material and institutional in nature—and not simply “discursive.” Even Foucault in his thick “historical” description implicitly recognizes a human reality beyond the subjective interpretation of texts. In his later writings, Foucault, in an indirect turn to philosophical pragmatism, embraced “the spirit” of the Enlightenment—the efficacy of human individuality and resistance—while still rejecting its metaphysics. Power must be exercised and also resisted by somebody; thus, the writings of the late Foucault rediscovered an arena for human subjectivity and constrained choice—the body. Foucault could even be accused of “essentializing” the body as the sole material “site” of all repression/sexuality and the ultimate location of resistance. This “Nietzschean” aesthetic project of creating the self appears limited to the realm

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of sexuality; other forms of human subjectivity remain constituted by “power/knowledge” discourses which “construct” the individual, but upon which the individual seems to have no reciprocal effect. But the re-emergence of a concept of human subjectivity and conscious self-creation in the late Foucault demonstrates that the project of democratizing human social relations inherently involves a theory of human agency and transformative possibilities.35

Can Post-Structuralism Adequately Theorize a Plausible Self and the Possibility of Human Solidarity? The question remains as to whether post-structuralist theory can aid intellectuals and political activists in developing a compelling public philosophy that promotes a politics of pluralism, equality, and solidarity. Wendy Brown’s States of Injury, Judith Butler’s work, particularly her more explicit political commentary in Feminist Contentions, and William E. Connolly’s The Ethos of Pluralization, represent three efforts to theorize a politics of radical democratic solidarity that draws heavily upon post-structuralist precepts. Each of these theorists embraces the “post-structuralist” critique of both liberal individualism and group-based identity politics.36 Yet a profound tension remains between these theorists’ commitment to radical democracy and their post-structuralist theoretical orientation. For if efforts to construct communities of shared values and interests are rejected as efforts to “norm” the self, then the possibility for human beings to transform political reality remains dim indeed. If all forms of cohesive communities and coherent individual identities are suspect, then the only form of “resistance” possible is that of isolated, “fragmented selves.” But despite their stated “radical democratic” political aims, their writings are relatively inattentive to the role that both political economy and conservative ideology have played in the construction of political identity. If one could read post-structuralist theory of the 1990s and early twenty-first century absent any awareness of the actual politics of that period, one might come away believing that the primary source of oppression in the 1980s and 1990s derived from enlightenment liberalism’s (and traditional radicalism’s) desire for universal justice. In reality, conservative marketplace ideology dominated both popular and social scientific discourse during this period, as manifested by the neo-liberal consensus in global political economy and rational choice theory’s dominance of mainstream social science. By the 1990s the false “universal” haunting the academy was no longer teleological Marxism or the rational chooser of Rawlsian social welfare liberalism, but the ideology of the universal, fair, efficient market. As the owl of Minerva too often spreads its wings at dusk, postmodern theory attacked Rawlsian social welfare liberalism at the very moment when crude Smithianism had displaced social welfare liberalism as the dominant discourse of both social policy and social science.37 Butler, Brown, and Connolly reject the essentialism of “narrow” identity politics as an inverted “ressentiment” of the Enlightenment desire for a universal, homogenized identity. They judge identity politics to be a politics of “wounding, resentment, and victimization” that only can yield bad-faith moralization.

Post-Structuralist Political Theory 57 Wendy Brown takes to task identity politics for “essentializing” conceptions of group identity. For example, she critiques the work of Catherine MacKinnon as epitomizing “identity” political theory, accusing MacKinnon of denying women agency by depicting them purely as victims.38 Brown also remains wary of the patriarchal, conformist nature of traditional left conceptions of solidarity and citizenship. Brown’s implicit concept of radical democratic citizenship rests upon the recognition that political identity is continually in flux and is socially constituted through “agonal” political struggle. Brown celebrates an Arendtian conception of a polity in which both shared and particular identities are continually open to reconstruction. In this “left Nietzschean” view of an “everyperson’s” will to power, there can be no cultural certainties or political givens, as such “givens” would repress difference and fluidity.39 But, if the human condition is a world of permanent flux, then we must postulate a human capability of living with constant insecurity, for in this world there can be no stable political institutions or political identities.40 An ability to calculate the probabilities of political actions or public policies would disappear in this world of infinite liminality. By assuming that the pre-eminent democratic value is that of leaving all issues as permanently open to question, post-structuralist “democratic theory” eschews the theoretical and political struggle over what established institutions and consensual values are needed to underpin a democratic society. Post-structuralist analysis has contributed to a healthy suspicion of narrow and “essentializing” identity politics. But a self-identified feminist, AfricanAmerican, or lesbian activist is likely to value the shared historical narratives that partly constitute such group identities. Of course, if one is a democrat and a pluralist, one would reject the oppressive homogenization and potentially authoritarian aspects of ethnic or racial chauvinism and of “essentializing” types of identity politics. The democratic political home should be open, fluid, and self-reflective; but if participation is to be open to all, then such a society also needs to reproduce a shared democratic culture and the institutional guarantee of democratic rights. That is, contrary to post-structuralist analysis, not all issues can be open to “agonal struggle” in a democratic society. The traditional radical democratic critique of democratic capitalism remains valid; the equal worth of the individual is devalued by rampant social inequality within and between groups. Thus, a radical democrat, whether post-structuralist or not, must not only be committed to institutional protections of political and civil rights, but also to social rights—the equal access to the basic goods of citizenship (education, health care, housing, child care). Of course, the precise nature and extent of these rights will be politically contested and constructed. But a democratic society cannot leave as totally “open” the minimal institutional basis of democracy—a democratic society cannot be agnostic as to the value of freedom of speech, association, and universal suffrage. Social movements fighting for an expansion of civil, political, and social rights, rarely, if ever, rest their arguments on appeals to epistemological truths— whether “foundational” or “anti-foundational.” To remain democratic, their policy goals cannot be so specific that they preclude political argument about both their worth and how best to institutionalize them. If social movements in a

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democratic society deemed that every policy defeat meant a betrayal of basic democratic principles, there would be no give-and-take or winners and losers within democratic politics. But if a government were to abolish freedom of speech and competitive elections, or deny a social group basic rights, it would be reasonable for an observer to judge that democratic principles had been violated. Democratic political movements and coalitions struggle to construct shared meanings about those political, civil, and social rights that should be guaranteed to all citizens—and they often work to expand the types of persons to be recognized as citizens (such as excluded immigrants). Such arguments are inevitably grounded in normative arguments that go beyond merely asserting the import of “flux,” “difference,” and “anti-essentialism.” The civil rights movement did not demand equal rights for all solely as an “agonal” assertion of the will of the excluded; they desired to gain for persons of color an established set of civil and political rights that had been granted to some citizens and denied to others. The movement correctly assumed that the exclusion of citizens from full political and civil rights violated the basic norms of a democratic society. Thus, postmodern epistemological commitments to “flux” and “openness” cannot in-and-of-themselves sustain the “fixed” moral positions needed to sustain a radical democracy. Post-structuralist theorists openly proclaim their hostility to all philosophical “meta-narratives.” They reject comprehensive conceptions of how society operates and the type of society that would best instantiate human freedom. But post-structuralists go beyond rejecting “meta-narratives”; they insist that only an “anti-foundational” epistemology can ground a politics of emancipation. For Butler, Brown, and Connolly, not only do “meta-discourses” invariably fail in their efforts to ground moral positions in a theory of human nature or human reason. They also assert that an agonal politics of democratic “we” formation can alone sustain democratic society. This agonal politics, they claim, can only be sustained by a recognition of the inconstant signification of discourse and the ineluctable flux of personal and group identity.41 Rejecting the authoritarian, celebration of the “ubermensch” by Nietzsche, they offer a post-Nietzschean, “amoral” conception of democracy as an open-ended project of defining a self and community that is constantly open to the desires of “others.” These theorists constantly reiterate the definitiveness (dare we say “foundational truth”) of this grounding of democracy, despite the historical reality that social movements often contest dominant narratives in the name of a stable alternative narrative of a democratic and pluralist community. One might well contend that the post-structuralist political stance is guilty of a new meta-narrative of “bad faith,” that of “anti-foundationalism.” According to this anti-foundational politics, a true democrat must reject any and all a priori truths allegedly grounded upon the nature of human reason or human nature. A committed democrat may well be skeptical of such neo-Kantian or neo-Hegelian conceptions of freedom; but, many committed democrats justify their moral commitments using these philosophical methods. A democrat might also reject (or accept) the arguments of a Jurgen Habermas or Hans Georg Gadamer that the structure of human linguistic communication contains within it the potential

Post-Structuralist Political Theory 59 for a society based on reasoned argument rather than manipulation and domination. But there are numerous other philosophically “pragmatic” ways to justify democracy, even utilitarian ones. Political democrats may well disagree about the best philosophical defense of democracy. But, invariably, “practicing democrats” will defend the belief (however philosophically “proved” or “justified”) that democratic regimes best fulfill the moral commitment to the equal worth of persons and to the equal potential of human beings to freely develop and pursue their life plans. To contend that only an anti-foundationalist, anti-realist epistemology can sustain democracy is to argue precisely for a foundational metaphysical grounding for the democratic project. It is to contend that one’s epistemology determines one’s politics. Hence, Brown and Butler both spoke at a spring 1998 academic conference at the University of California at Santa Cruz where some attributed “reactionary” and “left cultural conservatism” to belief in “reactionary” “foundationalist humanism.”42 Post-structuralism cannot escape its own essentialist conception of identity. For example, Butler contends in Feminist Contentions that democratic feminists must embrace the post-structuralist “nondefinability of woman” as best suited to open democratic constitution of what it is to be a “woman.”43 But this is itself a “closed” position and runs counter to the practices of many democratic feminist activists who have tried to develop a pluralist, yet collective identity around the shared experiences of being a woman in a patriarchal society (of course, realizing that working-class women and women of color experience patriarchy in some ways that are distinct from the patriarchy experienced by middle-class white women). One query that post-structuralist theorists might ask themselves: has there ever existed a mass social movement that defined its primary “ethical” values as being those of “instability and flux”? Certainly many sexual politics activists are cognizant of the fluid nature of sexuality and sexual and gender identity. But only a small (disproportionately university educated) segment of the women’s and gay and lesbian movement would subscribe to (or even be aware of) the core principles of post-structuralist “anti-essentialist epistemology.” Nor would they be agnostic as to whether the state should protect their rights to express their sexuality. Post-structuralist theorists cannot avoid justificatory arguments for why some identities should be considered open and democratic and others exclusionary and anti-democratic. That is, how could post-structuralist political theorists argue that Nazi or Klan “ethics” are antithetical to a democratic society—and that a democratic society can rightfully ban certain forms of “agonal” (e.g. harassing forms of behavior against minorities) struggle on the part of such anti-democratic groups. A politics of radical democratic pluralism cannot be securely grounded by a whole-hearted epistemological critique of “enlightenment rationality.” For implicit to any radical democratic project is a belief in the equal moral worth of persons; to embrace such a position renders one at least a “critical defender” of enlightenment values of equality and justice, even if one rejects “enlightenment metaphysics” and believes that such values are often embraced by non-Western cultures. Of course, democratic norms are developed by political practice and

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struggle rather than by abstract philosophical argument. But this is a sociological and historical reality rather than a trumping philosophical proof. Liberal democratic publics rarely ground their politics in coherent ontologies and epistemologies; and even among trained philosophers there is no necessary connection between one’s metaphysics and one’s politics. There have, are, and will be Kantian conservatives (Nozick), liberals (Rawls), and radicals (Joshua Cohen; Susan Okin); teleologists, left, center, and right (Michael Sandel, Alasdair McIntyre, or Leo Strauss); anti-universalist feminists (Judith Butler, Wendy Brown) and quasi-universalist, Habermasian feminists (Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser). Post-structuralists try to read off from an epistemology or ontology a politics; such attempts simply replace enlightenment meta-narratives with postmodern (allegedly anti) meta-narratives. Such efforts represent an idealist version of the materialist effort—which post-structuralists explicitly condemn—to read social consciousness off of the structural position of “the agent.” A democratic political theory must offer both a theory of social structure and of the social agents capable of building such a society. In exchanging the gods of Weber and Marx for Nietzsche and Heidegger (or their epigones Foucault and Derrida), poststructuralist theory has abandoned the institutional analysis of social theory for the idealism of abstract philosophy. Connolly, Brown, and Butler reject explicit moral deliberation as a bad faith Nietzschean attempt at “ressentiment.” Instead, they celebrate the amoral, yet ethical strivings of a Machiavellian or Gramscian realist “war of position.”44 Sheldon Wolin, however, has written convincingly of how Machiavelli can be read as an ethical realist, a theorist of moral utilitarianism.45 Even a Machiavellian or Gramscian political “realist” must depend upon moral argument to justify the social utility of hard political choices. That is, if one reads both as ethical utilitarians who believe that, at times, one must “dirty” one’s hands in order to act ethically in politics, then they embrace a utilitarian, “just war” theory of ethical choice. According to this consequentialist moral logic, “bad means” are only justifiable if they are the only, unavoidable way to achieve a greater ethical good—and if the use of such “bad means” are absolutely minimized. Such “hard” political choices yield social policies and political outcomes that fix identities as well as transform them. Not only in regard to epistemological questions has post-structuralist theory created a new political “metaphysics” which misconstrues the nature of democratic political practice; the post-structuralist analysis of “the death of man” and “the death of the subject” also radically preclude meaningful political agency. As with Michel Foucault, Butler conceives of “subjects” as “produced” by powerknowledge discourses. In Butler’s view, the modernist concept of an autonomous subject is a “fictive construct”; and the very act of adhering to a belief in autonomous human choice is to engage in “exclusion and differentiations, perhaps a repression, that is subsequently concealed, covered over, by the effect of autonomy.”46 That is, the power of discourse, of language and the unconscious, “produces subjects.” If those “subjects” conceive of themselves as having the capacity for conscious choice, they are guilty of “repressing” the manner in which their own “subjectivity” is itself produced by discursive

Post-Structuralist Political Theory 61 exclusion: “if we agree that politics and a power exist already at the level at which the subject and its agency are articulated and made possible, then agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to inquire into its construction.”47 Susan Bickford pithily summarizes the post-structuralist rejection of the modernist subject: “power is not wielded by autonomous subjects; rather through power, subjectivity is crafted.”48 Bickford grants that post-structuralism provides some insight into how group and individual identity is “culturally constructed.” But Bickford goes on to contend that after post-structuralism exposes the “lie of the natural” (that there are no natural human identities), “socially constructed” modern individuals still wish to act in consort with others and to use human communication to influence others: “people generally understand themselves as culturally constituted and capable of agency.”49 For if there is no “doer behind the deed,” but only “performative” acts that constitute the subject, how can the theorist (or activist) assign agency or moral responsibility to actors who are “constituted by discursive practices.” (“Discursive practices” engaged in by whom, the observer may ask?) Butler insists that not only is the subject “socially constituted” by power/knowledge discourses, but so too is the “ontologically reflexive self” of the enlightenment. Now if this claim is simply that all social critics are socially-situated, then this view of agency is no more radical a claim than that made by Michael Walzer in his conception of the social critic (or agent). Walzer argues that even the most radical dissident must rely upon the critical resources embedded within his own culture (often in the almost-hidden interstices of that culture). Effective critical agency cannot depend on some abstract universal, external logic.50 Asserting that critical capacities are themselves socially constructed provides the reader with no means by which to judge whether forms of “resistance” are democratic and which are not. That is, no matter how hard one tries to substitute an aesthetic, “ironic,” “amoral ethical sensibility” for morality, the social critic and political activist cannot escape engaging in moral argument and justification with fellow citizens. Butler astutely notes that “resistance” often mirrors the very powerknowledge discourses it rejects—resisting hegemonic norms without offering alternative conceptions of a common political life. But Butler seems to affirm the possibility (by whom?) of effective rejection of such “norming” by “performative resignification.” But the “resignification” of “performative” discursive constructions provides no criteria by which to judge whether a given “resignification” is emancipatory or repressive.51 And just who (if not a relatively coherent, choosing human subject) is “performing” the resignification. Furthermore, if all forms of identity and social meaning are predicated upon “exclusion,” then the democratic theorist needs to distinguish among those identities which “exclude” in a democratic way and those which exclude in an anti-humanist, racist, and sexist manner. Some social “identities” are democratic and pluralist, such as those created by voluntary affiliations. But other “identities,” such as structural, involuntary class differences and racial and sexual hierarchies, must be transformed, even eliminated, if democracy is to be furthered. And how we behave—or “perform”—can subvert (or reinforce) such undemocratic social structures. But if these social structures are immutably inscribed by

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“performative practices,” then there can be no democratic resistance. In her call for an ironic politics of “performative resistance,” Butler seems to imply that human beings have the capacity to choose which “performative practices” to engage in—and from which to abstain. If this is the case, then a modernist conception of agency and moral responsibility has covertly snuck its way back into Butler’s political strategy.52 Butler comes dangerously close to embracing a politics of conscious moral choice when she urges Jews to empathize with the suffering of Palestinians53 and in her occasional comments that hint at granting “human subjects” the possibility of reworking their identity to be more in conformity with democratic values: “the subject is neither a ground nor a product, but the permanent possibility of a certain resignifying process, but which is power’s own possibility of being reworked.”54 But material and structural constraints can limit the ability of a social actor to engage in effective resistance. If our political efforts fail to transform the distribution of power within a given social structure, then “performative” resistance, on its own, is likely to be ineffective. After all, one can’t “perform” oneself out of the structural reality of having a boss who can fire you “at will.” This is a structural reality that faces all workers in the United States who do not have a union contract guaranteeing a grievance procedure or “show cause” for dismissal. A worker without a union contract cannot “perform” herself out of the structural power relation of being hired and fired at the whim of the employer! A philosophical pragmatist might respond to Butler that even if we grant that “we” are “discursively constructed” by “performative practices,” how does such a conception of the self inform us as to how “we” (even if “we” be “fictive modernist selves”) negotiate the social constraints and possibilities that “we” (as “fictive subjects”) confront every day? That is, does “discourse” exist in a vacuum? Is it not “produced” by human cultural and social practices and institutions? These social practices not only “constitute” subjects, but also communities in which human beings establish relations of nurturance, care, and friendship— as well as “agonal” conflict. We all engage in political and social behavior that involves individual choice that affects others (and is communicated to others). “Post-structuralist” feminist theorists not only communicate with each other; they also work to persuade their students of the insight of post-structuralist analysis. These everyday practices demonstrate that even “post-structuralists” take their ability to communicate coherently with other “selves” seriously. Philosophical concepts only carry weight with everyday citizens (and students) if they are in “reflective equilibrium” with how persons experience the world. When human beings think politically, they conceive of the political aims that they, as subjects with (constrained) agency, desire to achieve. They also consider how other individuals and social groups will react to these projects and proposals, for social and political action necessitates thinking about the likely reaction of one’s audience. And, as Leslie Thiel, Nancy Fraser, and Iris Marion Young, among others, have pointed out, while social groups are internally diverse, they are “constituted” by narratives of shared cultural and historical experiences.55 Individual members of ascriptive, religious, and voluntary groups

Post-Structuralist Political Theory 63 can solidarize with others, but they also can (and do) engage in disagreements within the group. This simply illustrates the “sociological construction” of identity, but also the capacity for individual choice, but within the structural and normative constraints of a culture. Perhaps this is why most sociologists accept as (somewhat a truism) Anthony Giddens’ theory of “structuration.”56 Human societies are constituted by a complex interaction of structures (cultural, political, and economic) and (individual and group) agency. This reality may well be why theorists as diverse as the Hegelian-influenced Charles Taylor, critical theorist Nancy Fraser, and identity politics theorist Susan Hekman all believe modern human beings conceive themselves to be capable of both self-reflection and self-possession.57 Call this a “modernist” sensibility (or “modernist fiction”) if you like, but self-reflective activity is characteristic of many individuals across different types of societies. In light of the above analysis, it is not surprising that both Foucault and Butler appear to sneak “agency” through the back door by admitting that “subjects” can “resist” their “discursive constitution.” Foucault contends that “within the capillaries of ‘productive power’ lie the possibility of diffuse resistance” by those who strive to create an “ethics of the self” or “aesthetics of existence” which resists the “identity” created by the productive capabilities of power/knowledge discourses.58 In his final works on sexuality, Foucault claims to embrace the values, if not epistemology, of the enlightenment, through the belief that we can achieve freedom through the aesthetic constitution of “the body.”59 Butler believes that by “resisting” the “normed” “iterative, discursive performances” that constitute the subject, human beings can ironically subvert our “discursively constituted” roles.60 But as Susan Hekman comments on Foucault’s ambiguous relationship to human subjectivity, while “his theory of resistance requires a subject who acts, yet his theory of subjectification precludes such a subject.”61 Who is it, Hekman asks, that creates ourselves as a “work of art”? And what normative criteria do Butler or Foucault offer that would help us to decide whether a specific form of resistance increases human freedom or not? To try to solve this puzzle of the “ungrounded,” yet choosing self, Hekman develops the concept of the “ungrounded, grounded self.”62 She draws on the object-relations psychology of W.D. Winnicott and Melanie Klein to argue that through a child’s relationships with parents and siblings, we develop a “primary identity” that enables us to navigate the various social identities we encounter as adults. Hekman allows for self-reflexive choice in adulthood; women, she argues, can reject or accept the social identity of “feminism.” But if we can make (constrained) choices as to our values and group membership in adulthood, then it would seem that, contrary to Hekman, we develop further forms of “objectrelations” (and develop and reform our “core identity”) past the formative stage of childhood. There are limits, of course, to how malleable our psychic selves are; and whether influenced by Freud or object-relations psychology, most of us recognize (to some extent) how our childhood experiences shape our adult psychic journey. But the proclivity of academics to emotional introspection (and, yes, formal psychotherapy) provides further evidence that many persons believe they remain capable of self-reflection and transformation during their

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adult years. While we may fail in our efforts, most of us try to alter some of the child-rearing methods we learned (often in a heavily ingrained manner) from our own parents. Hekman offers a promising “relational” conception of the self; but her belief that our “core self” is permanently fixed at the end of childhood ignores the reality that psychic development continues throughout the lifecourse.63 An adequate theoretical understanding of how people practice politics must grapple with the social reality of actors who think that they have choice. Poststructuralism offers no coherent theory of inter-subjectivity and social action (and would appear to imply that a human being who thinks they have agency and choice is deluded). In reality, the post-structuralist theory of the “performative self” is a peculiar form of methodological individualist analysis (although, in contrast to the “rational chooser” of public choice theory, here the individual is incoherent and fragmented). But a social theory that comprehends how individuals operate inter-subjectively must illuminate the institutional, cultural, and material constraints placed upon individual and group agency. Many commentators note that neither Brown nor Butler analyze how social and group dynamics constitute the self. Butler’s holds that “resistance” only can come through an “ironic” and subversive choice (?) to “perform” outside the iterative norms that enables and constitutes the subject. Such a conception not only raises the nowtraditional question of whether she can define who is “the doer behind the deed” of resistance. It also raises an ironic parallel between the methodological (“anti”) individualist nature of Butler’s world of discursively constructed subjects and Rawls’s “rational chooser.” Social constructivists (from communitarians to deliberative democrats) frequently criticize Rawls for deducing rules of justice from the representative thinking of one (deracinated and de-sexed) ideal chooser operating in the original position and behind the veil of ignorance. In a similar manner, Butler’s “performative” resister appears to be a “representative” (incoherent) “subject” whose repertoire of “ironic,” “performative” resistance seems to draw upon disembodied discourse. (Seemingly one “incoherent self” can represent all “incoherent selves.”) Interaction among these “fragmented selves” never appears to affect the “performative” constitution of any given self. And language or “discourse” seems to have a free-floating existence apart from the social and cultural practices that influence the behavior of social individuals. ‘Discursive’ performance is not the sole manner by which individuals deal with (and express) the material and cultural structural realities that both empower and constrain individuals. For example, individuals cannot readily “discursively perform” themselves out of their socio-economic or class position. There is a certain materiality to poverty or to being “bossed” that can’t simply be “ironically” and “performatively” transformed. Class relations are structural, as well as discursive. The greater difficulty in forming unions in the United States— as compared to other advanced industrial democracies—has much to do with American legal, ideological, and political constraints and not simply with the relative inefficacy of the “performative,” “counter-hegemonic” behavior of (fragmented) individuals. Even the “parodic” possibilities of “gender” reversal are constrained by the communities in which one resides. Is the “reversal” of “drag”

Post-Structuralist Political Theory 65 a viable public possibility in a violently homophobic community? Were not the “performative” options of a Matthew Sheperd (extremely) more limited than those of a gay or lesbian student at a “progressive” residential liberal arts college (and unsafe—and even degrading and violent—social spaces confront gay and lesbian people and women and students of color in the most allegedly “cosmopolitan” of social spaces). Simply put, distinct “social spaces” set differential constraints on “performative” choices. Of course, how individuals express class, race, gender, and sexuality does, in part, involve how we “perform” (or “resist”) cultural and discursive “norms.” Hence, the inevitable controversies over “authenticity” within racial, sexual, and ethnic communities, as well as criticism of people taking on the morés of a class different from those who share their “place” in the labor process, neighborhood, or income strata. But there are material constraints to performative “choice”: one can’t “perform” one’s way out of an under-funded inner city school or out of being a laid-off auto worker with dim prospects of finding a new job with comparable wages and benefits. Traditional sociological theories of “structuration” provide greater insight into how these individuals would deal with these social dilemmas than do micro-level theories of the discursive construction of subjectivity.

Post-Structuralist Politics: Radical Democracy Plus Epistemological Fireworks; or, Can Democratic Politics be Truly “Amoral”? To her credit, Wendy Brown is more concerned with issues of class and political economy than are many post-structuralist political theorists. She expressly claims to bring class back into her political analysis and condemns identity politics as a “phantasmagorical reflection of the ‘middle-class’ American dream.” But there is little attention in her work to developing a political strategy that could promise a structural and material redistribution of power, rather than an alteration of how we think of epistemology, discourse, and politics.64 While ideology and culture play a relatively autonomous role in constituting subjectivity, both have a material structure that must be altered if society is to be democratized. Brown implies that radical social change does not as much involve democratizing social structural relations as it does popularizing a radical epistemological approach to discourse. Brown argues that if we will ourselves to “surrender epistemological foundations” and give up “specifically moral claims” we will all be able to engage in “the sheerly political: ‘wars of position’ and amoral contests about the just and good in which truth is always grasped as coterminous with power, as always already power, as the voice of power.”65 Even if one resists asking whether democracy can rest on “amoral” principles, one can still ask whether Brown’s Foucauldian assertation that power and truth are co-terminous can distinguish between more or less democratic forms of power? The post-structuralist hyper-emphasis on “discourse” and the agonal construction of the self also overly devalues the state as an arena for political reform. Brown’s work makes a positive political contribution by warning social

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movements about fetishizing the struggle for group rights within the law as potential minefields of “reversed” power/knowledge formations. State regulation and technocratic control which claim to defend the interests of newly, legallyrecognized identities may yield the perverse consequence of “domesticating” the identity of the insurgent social group (e.g. state micro-management of the work place in “comparable worth legislation,” or enforcement of patriarchal values in regard to punitive workfare or “child support” regulation).66 Sometimes, as Brown contends, new-found rights may enhance separation and alienation between and within individuals and groups, as well as constitute new forms of state regulation in the name of the impersonal subject. But Brown rejects the possibility (and historical reality) that new “rights” can, in other contexts, contribute to human emancipation by enhancing individual choice and freedom. To deny this is to ignore the elective affinity between the struggle for “rights” and struggles to achieve political equality for formerly subordinate peoples. Not all new-found rights are “co-optative” and a “reinscribing of domination.”67 Nor will the conflict within the American polity over how we should interpret and defend “rights” ever cease. One only has to witness contemporary political conflict over “abortion rights,” “voting rights,” “gun rights,” etc. Rights are both politically contested and protective of certain forms of human choice and agency. Rights do not “fix” identities as intransigently as Brown and other poststructuralists claim. Do rights only serve, as Brown contends, to promote “the discursive denial of historically layered and institutionally secured bounds, by denying with words the effects of relatively wordless, politically invisible, yet material constraints”?68 Patricia Williams and other critical race theorists have argued that being included under the state’s equal protection law helped limit violence against people of color.69 Despite legitimate fears about excessive state regulation of sexuality, would Brown reject the use of state force to limit domestic violence? How does her philosophical fear of the bureaucratic-regulatory powers of the state speak to the experience of hundreds of thousands of women who have been spared the “privatization” of domestic violence by the extension of the rights of state authority (e.g. the police) to act against violence within the household? Are such practices solely evidence of the “reconstruction of domination by the regulation of the technocratic-bureaucratic state”? Of course, state regulation of domestic violence may, in Brown’s language, produce a female subject “dependent upon the paternal state” for protection. But is this not preferable to the prior form of paternal state that let a man be the violent definer of “rights” in his home? Upon occasion, Brown calls for a more nuanced reading of state power. She admits that the “same aspects of masculinism do not appear in each modality of state power,” a state which is not a unified “it,” “but an ensemble of discourses, rules and practices, [which] cohabit in limited, tension-ridden often contradictory relation with one another.”70 This admission suggests, however, that if feminists are to both exploit and subvert masculinist state power, they must judge whether state legislation and regulation promotes human freedom or deters it. That is, some state policies promote greater freedom, while others hinder its development. Too often, Brown’s post-Foucauldian read of the state as

Post-Structuralist Political Theory 67 a repressive engine of discursive micro-power implies that all forms of reformist politics are inherently counter-productive. William E. Connolly’s The Ethos of Pluralization represents the most explicit post-structuralist effort to outline an operative politics.71 His work also possesses a greater sensibility than does most post-structuralist theory to the nature of late capitalist political economy and the relationship between economic inequality and political inequality. But this attentiveness, which draws upon Connolly’s earlier, pioneering work as a critic of liberal pluralism,72 stands uneasily with his recent post-structuralist epistemological commitments. Connolly wishes to distinguish post-structuralist plurality from both traditional liberal and radical forms of pluralism. Connolly’s “post-Nietzschean” (i.e. philosophically “antifoundationalist”) critique of conventional pluralism contends that pluralism’s celebration of diversity remains dependent on fixed conceptions of “the normal individual, monotheistic or monosecular morality, and the territorial state.”73 Such modernist notions, according to Connolly, “freeze out” of the dominant culture the submerged, contingent identities of an ephemeral, global, postmodern world. But Connolly never explains how one would (practically and politically) distinguish a “postmodern” radical committed to emergent identities fulfilling their human potential politically from a radical democratic universalism committed to equal respect for persons? And does post-structuralist theory offer convincing arguments for the democratic redistribution of resources and opportunities? It may well be the case that any democratic egalitarianism, no matter how post-structuralist its “ontological” sensibility, will overtly or covertly defend the (inherently universal) values of solidarity and equality. If it does not, then that postmodern politics is unlikely to be truly democratic nor egalitarian. In place of a liberal tolerance whose implicit assumptions of the “normal individual” and “pre-existing subject” contains and restrains emergent identities, Connolly embraces an “ethos of critical responsiveness” to new social movements that rebel against “congealed standards of political judgment and hegemonic identities.” Connolly contends that this “politics of pluralization” which nurtures “emergent identities” is in constant tension with the static politics of “liberal pluralism.”74 Liberal pluralism, according to Connolly, is constructed upon the false dualism of identity/difference.75 Liberals are tolerant of those who are allegedly “different” from themselves; but such tolerance enables liberals to avoid confronting how their own identity is constructed by the repression of “difference”—both within ourselves and among ourselves. In contrast to the restrictive, fixed conception of identity contained in liberal conceptions of tolerance, “the ethos of pluralization” realizes that emancipatory politics “disturbs, threatens, and ultimately transcends” conventional boundaries of identity, morality, and the state. Yet, if one drops, even for a moment, the epistemological concerns of poststructuralist political theory, the question remains: in what way is this “poststructuralist” radical politics distinct from prior conceptions of radical democracy? First, if emergent identities frequently break with “normal conceptions” of identity, these “new identities” rarely embrace the fragmented poststructuralist conception of “contingent identity.” New social movements

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consciously constitute shared identities through the development of common cultural and historical narratives that cut across differences of race, class, or gender (while, at times, maintaining a pluralist sensibility to how differences continue to operate within a group that shares some common experiences of exclusion and oppression). Thus, academic forms of queer or feminist theory, which emphasize the disunity of self and group, have not had widespread impact within mainstream feminist and gay and lesbian liberation movements. In addition, when such movements make claims for equal social standing and build alliances across oppressed groups, they appeal to universal conceptions of rights and of shared humanity. Otherwise, why should a straight African-American be sympathetic to the gay liberation movement or a white queer woman ally with those struggling for the rights of African-Americans, Latinos, or straight trade unionists? If they do so, one motivating factor is likely to be a shared belief in the dignity of personhood—across group identities. To build democratic majoritarian coalitions, members of distinct groups must be able to identify with the claim for mutual respect made by “others.” And only if we feel those “others” to be our “fellow” citizens are we able to identify with their distinct experience of oppression and exclusion, even if their experience is different from our own lived history. Democratic insurgency cannot solely involve the assertion of a particular identity. Insurgent democratic groups must also appeal to the solidarity of others to support their right to equal respect. And this solidarity will often result from a common moral belief in the democratic principle of the equal moral worth of persons. If Connolly rejects such democratic values and believes poststructuralist democrats should support the assertion of public identity by any and all groups then would he not logically have to defend skinhead, Nazi, or white male elite claims for greater respect for their particular identity? That is, why are certain identities (fragmented or not) worthy of democratic concern and respect and others not? Is it not because democrats only solidarize with the claims for inclusion of groups who have been undemocratically excluded. (If a democracy chooses to reject for equal consideration the political voice of an antidemocratic racist or authoritarian group, this exclusion is not a violation of the democratic principle of equal consideration.) Radical democrats, no matter how much they respect particular identities, inevitably employ quasi-universal criteria to determine which identities merit respect and cultivation within a democratic culture—and which do not. Radical democrats do not worry about the underrepresentation of socially or politically privileged groups because such groups have not been denied fair (universal) treatment by society. Democrats do not worry about the under-representation of anti-democratic groups that reject the very norms of democratic pluralism. Post-structuralist theorists decry the marginalization and exclusion of oppressed groups; but they also implicitly rely upon quasi-universal democratic norms to justify the inclusion of previously excluded groups who have conformed to democratic norms. One would hope post-structuralist radical democrats do not agonize over the exclusion or underrepresentation of anti-democratic voices. In fact, if those voices are driven underground by the hegemony of democratic norms, democrats should not be worried.

Post-Structuralist Political Theory 69 While Connolly calls for new global solidarities which transcend national boundaries, he fails to advance arguments as to why human beings should care for one another across such traditional divides. Many will assert that empathy cannot transcend the national and narrower communitarian boundaries that Connolly criticizes. In response to such skepticism Connolly and other poststructuralist “democrats” inevitably sneak in quasi-Enlightenment arguments about human interdependence, the inherent dignity of all human beings, and the right of all to fulfill their human potential (regardless of the accident of nationality, a status defined by the accident of birth). Meanwhile, Connolly’s compelling defense, in Chapter 2, of economic equality as a prerequisite for “radical pluralization” could be endorsed by any committed pluralist democratic socialist.76 As Stanley Aronowitz wrote at the beginning of the post-structuralist moment in political theory (in the then-noted collection Universal Abandon), scratch a postmodern radical democrat and deep down they remain ethical socialists.77 Nor can post-structuralist democrats’ epistemological commitments allow them to defend the democratic principle that power in a democratic society should be commensurate with a group’s democratic numbers and not with its economic, cultural, or educational capital. That is, a politics of difference cannot be emancipatory if it is built upon a terrain of unequal power. Today, white (and increasingly non-white) suburbanites view inner city residents as so culturally “different” that bonds of common citizenship are non-existent. In order to supplant a mean-spirited politics of exclusion and policing of the poor with a politics committed to a redistribution of wealth and power, radical democratic theorists and activists must advance an ethos of shared citizenship alongside an “ethos of pluralization.” Democratic social movements must overcome the false dichotomies of unity/difference and solidarity/diversity if social justice is to be achieved. Postmodern feminist theory insightfully criticizes traditional patriarchal and white supremacist notions of citizenship and entitlement. But doing so does not excuse radical democrats from reconstructing and defending a renewed vision of common citizenship, solidarity, and social rights. Post-structuralists take on an all-too-easy-target when they insist that a utopian vision cannot be founded and justified upon a philosophy of history that trumps political argument through appeals to teleological inevitability. After the collapse of authoritarian communism, how many teleological, dogmatic Marxists are there left to beat up upon (yet alone humanist, progressive liberals)? Post-structuralist social theory performed the useful function of discrediting remaining structuralist tendencies (among intellectuals) that dogmatically conjoined a “structural” subject position with an imputed, “true” consciousness. Neither the “ruse of reason,” nor a dialectic critique of the present, can tell us “scientifically” what political truths will be instantiated in the revolutionary future. But the mounting of such a valid, but “negative” critique of teleological Marxism does not suffice to outline the institutional practices of a radical democracy—or yield a coherent strategy for contemporary democratic activists. To appropriate post-structuralist terminology, “epistemological critique” is solely a form of “resistance.” Post-structuralist rendering of all “positions” as “texts” of equivalent value

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provides few resources for rejecting the discourse of money and capital as abhorrent to a politics of human freedom. Why are the “performative” actions of a libertarian capitalist any less valid than the “performative” acts of a radical democrat in a “radically pluralist” society? Absent a relatively “fixed” conception of democratic citizenship, one cannot reject the politics of the libertarian right in favor of the politics of the democratic left. Being sensitive to the plurality of meanings within socially-constituted groups does not, in and of itself, constitute a democratic ethics. Contending that all “positions” are of equal merit, thus leaving all political outcomes to the “agonal arena,” fails to defend the value of democracy itself. Perhaps Habermas’s conception of the “ideal speech situation,” of each citizen speaking from an equal position of power, is overly procedural or too consensual a “foundational” notion of democracy. Rawls’ two principles of justice may also be an excessively apolitical argument for democracy, especially as Rawls appeared to believe that liberal constitutional principles can be derived by the rational deliberation of any one isolated, representative, rational chooser. But to criticize such moral heuristics as excessively Kantian or proceduralist, as many non-post-structuralist theorists have done as well, does not obviate the need for radical theory and practice to justify—and specify—the content of a democratic order. To justify the institutional and moral prerequisites of radical democracy, the democratic theorist must add to a post-structuralist “genealogy” of identityconstitution, a macro-structural analysis of how cultural, economic, and political institutions shape and constrain identity. Butler’s assertion that the underdefined nature of discourse inherently allows for “performative resignification” overestimates the extent to which “transgressive behavior” may alter institutions of power. One has simply to consider the absence of “performative options” historically for people of color or gays and lesbians living within undemocratic, repressive, racist, and homophobic communities to see the naïve, apolitical aspects of Butlerian analyses. Certainly, the struggle over several centuries of working people to alter the power relationships between labor and capital involved more than “performance.” Democratic social movements have organized politically to gain—and then use—state power to change social institutions, norms, and laws in a manner that enhances the power of the dispossessed. Of course, such efforts, in part, involve cultural and ideological behavior that might be loosely termed “performative.” But workers in a society in which they have no right to organize nor political rights are unlikely to be able to “perform” their way out of a subordinate class position. In short, the structure of material, cultural, and state power matter. And democratic social movements will aim to alter these institutions by political forms of action that include, but go well beyond, “performativity.” To garner the tax revenues necessary to provide for universal health care or public child care radicals will have to alter the tax code. And raising tax rates on upper-income individuals involves more than “performance.” One of the more emancipatory powers of the democratic state is enforcing progressive taxation. Finally, Butler (as well as other post-structuralist-influenced “cultural theorists”) radically underestimates how adept late capitalist political economy has been at co-opting the “performative self.” The commodification of

Post-Structuralist Political Theory 71 images by the advertising industry has both domesticated and incorporated “gender-bending behavior” into acts of capitalist consumption (cf. Calvin Klein’s definition of a pre-sexual, transgendered look as the mode of dress among trendy, middle-class, white youth).78 If individual and group identity is constituted not only by the micro power/knowledge discourses of performative practices, but also by ideological and institutional power, then not all identities may be as easily “bent” as others. For example, while race is certainly “socially constituted” and has no inherent genetic or phenotypical basis, can African-Americans, in a nation where the “1 percent rule” still partially governs social and political relationships, radically “deconstruct” their racial identity? And would they wish to “pass” (or “perform”) as something other than African-American? How should radical democrats respond to the discrimination and structural economic inequality confronting many African-Americans (and other communities of color)? Must they not go beyond “performative” resistance to organize on behalf of radical social policies that would “deconstruct” the material and political distribution of power and opportunity without necessarily “deconstructing” African-American (and other racial and ethnic) collective identity? Post-structuralist political theory, despite its alleged radicalism, mirrors traditional liberal pluralism’s inability to critique forms of power as undemocratic. By arguing that an agonal politics of a democratic “will-to-power” is possible in the here-and-now, post-structuralist theorists appear to judge contemporary politics a level-playing field in which all have the equal ability to make “transgressive discursive moves.” As with classical liberalism’s conception of individuals as free “contractors” in a “free market,” post-structuralists conceive of “free performers” engaging in acts of transgressive resistance, seemingly unconstrained by any inegalitarian structural distribution of resources of expression. But, if all political identity and distribution of power is purely a result of “discursive” political struggle, what is to stop a conservative postmodernist from contending that the United States has agonally and democratically decided that the competitive marketplace is the proper operative definition of democracy? Could not a conservative, libertarian post-structuralist theorist contend that the democratically, “socially constructed” American conception of the will-to-power is a world in which individual self-worth is determined by marketplace outcomes rather than through the public provision of basic human needs? After all, does not our entrepreneurial individualist politics, which forces candidates for office to spend most of their time trolling for corporate PAC funds in order to purchase TV advertising time, epitomize the “image-driven” nature of post-structuralist “discourse”? Yet as Wendy Brown admits at the opening of States of Injury, radical democrats must offer a vision of a political order that enhances the ability of individuals to deliberate equally and collectively about their common destiny.79 The social theorist must justify those political and socio-economic arrangements that would best institutionalize democratic principles. But such arguments will be political and not metaphysical. The retreat of much of contemporary political theory into epistemological concerns serves as a haven in a heartless conservative

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political world, where democratic agency seems next-to-impossible. But so long as self-described emancipatory political theory avoids arguing on the policy and political terrain of hegemonic conservative ideology—and remains obsessed with the metaphysical rather than the political—it will likely make little contribution to public political discourse. Post-structuralism has never offered—nor can it promise—a coherent social theory of how society develops and how it can be transformed by human action, as it only deals with the psychological and linguistic norming of (“incoherent”) individuals. In a manner strikingly akin to Rawlsian “foundational” liberal theory’s taking as “representative” of humanity one “rational chooser,” allegedly anti-representational post-structuralism takes as paradigmatic of the human condition one “fragmented, incoherent self.” Yet, in the real world, individuals and groups that resist dominant norms draw their alternative “practices” from the shared norms and understandings of their “counter-hegemonic” communities. Whether it be the “performative” resistance of dressing in “drag” or “slacking off” at work or rendering “Black as beautiful” as an alternative aesthetic of beauty, individuals construct practices of “resistance” in collaboration with others (who view themselves as having a self that can choose). Social movements develop strategies of resistance and try to discern how institutions (and persons) of authority will react to their resistance. As Susan Bickford notes, much of poststructuralist theory fails to comprehend the collective, inter-subjective nature of political contestation and communicative performance.80 “Performance” not only necessitates a social audience, it also necessitates the sociability of learning how to “resist.” We don’t “deploy” such strategies solely through our (incoherent) inner sanctum of discursive practices. The weakness of a hard poststructuralist epistemological and political perspective is not only its failure to speak to ordinary people’s conception of themselves as having (constrained) choice. It also fails to offer a theory of inter-subjectivity that provides insight into how human beings work to transform the institutions that constrain them. If discourse is everything, then we need to ask: where are the people struggling to be free?

4

Can a “Politics of Difference” (or “Identity Politics”) Ground a Radical Democratic Conception of Justice?

Introduction: Democracy, “Difference,” and Equality As I argued in the prior chapter, post-structuralists fail to offer any coherent political strategy for emancipation beyond individuals “performatively” “resisting” dominant norms. Post-structuralists are correct to worry that social movements can define “authentic” norms and behavior in ways that become overly restrictive and conformist; such non-pluralist movements can end up “norming” and “disciplining” their members. Feminists, queer theorists, and critical race theorists have critiqued the anti-political, homogenizing constraints of essentialist forms of identity politics.1 But while democratic pluralists should warn against homogenizing group pressures, they should not ignore the reality that the building of social movements involves the construction of shared narratives and common identities.2 While theorists of a “politics of difference” are more attentive to the social constitution and activities of social groups, as with post-structuralists, they sometimes fail to recognize that “difference” is frequently institutionalized upon a terrain of unequal power and resources. This oversight mirrors the failure of earlier liberal pluralist conceptions of politics to illuminate how the structural nature of power in capitalist democracies leads some groups to have much greater power than their numbers (or lack thereof) would democratically justify. Foucault’s concern with “micro-power”—and his conscious downplaying of the import of macro-structural social forces—renders most post-structuralist influenced theory silent in regard to the reconfiguration and accentuation of structural inequality integral to late capitalism (not only in regard to class, but also in regard to the material and cultural inequalities of race, gender, nationality, and sexual orientation). One can see how the complex interaction of inequalities of race, class, and gender influences United States politics. The insidious “raced and gendered” nature of economic inequality in the United States has been ideologically mobilized by the right to create sharp political divisions between the “old” industrial (and deindustrialized), predominantly white, male working class and the expanding (predominantly female, immigrant, and persons of color) “precariot” of the underemployed and unemployed. Thus, a “politics of difference” has not created a political majority capable of transforming the material and social conditions of poor communities of color or

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of working class and poor women (and men) of all races. The popular (and corporate) celebration of “diversity” has consciously failed to interrogate the relationship between inequality and “diversity.” Group assertion of “difference” can be empowering; but it can also be oppressive to those who are “othered” by dominant groups. Inner-city African-Americans have been “othered” by mainstream American society; and the vicious materiality of that “othering” has led most middle- and upper-working-class suburbanites (and not just whites) to fail to recognize inner-city residents as fellow citizens who merit a radical transformation of public policy aimed at achieving substantive equal opportunity for all citizens. This absence of a popular norm that “solidarity across difference” must underpin a democratic pluralist society is only reinforced by a false polarization within the academy between advocates of class and identity politics. Given the role race and gender play in structuring class identity and politics in the United States, one would think that Robin Kelly’s sage reminder that “class is raced-andgendered,” “race is class-and-gendered,” and “gender is raced-and-classed” would be an intellectual common-place.3 Recent critical evaluations of “identity politics” by social democratic (mostly male) intellectuals charge that the primacy of “identity politics” on the left has contributed to the left’s failure to critique growing economic inequality and to build a populist majority.4 There may be a small kernel of truth to this argument. But these authors underestimate the persistence of white, patriarchal practices on the left (and right) and fail to recognize how the right has utilized its dominance on issues of socio-economic policy (a faith in the deregulated market and the “work-ethic”) to attack the minimal, but crucial victories of the 1960s in regard to civil rights, affirmative action, reproductive rights, and sexual equality. The conservative effort, beginning in the 1970s, to extend its dominance in economic and foreign policy to the realm of social policy, forced feminists, gays and lesbians, and communities of color to engage in a defensive politics aimed at protecting past gains. Contrary to the argument of “left” critics of “identity politics,” if the women’s movement and civil rights community had abandoned a defense of reproductive rights and affirmation action, this would not have led to an overturning of conservative dominance on economic policy. Rather, it would have even further enhanced the growth in inequality brought about by neo-liberal deregulation. But these social democratic-inspired accounts of the decline of American progressivism correctly highlight the reality that the left is no longer popularly identified with the interests of the majority, but with the defense of particular, minority interests. The moral and political strength of the left historically derived from its ability to portray the struggle of a particular oppressed constituency as speaking to the interests of the majority. While Marx’s metaphysical universal class may never have existed, the majoritarian periods for the United States left reflected the ability of the labor movement in the 1930s and the civil rights movement in the 1960s to project their particular grievances as central to the achievement of full citizenship for all. In the 1960s, an all-too momentary political majority endorsed civil rights for citizens of color and embraced Dr. King’s view that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” But as

Can a “Politics of Difference” Achieve Justice? 75 soon as African-Americans achieved nominal legal equality, the nation split radically over the struggle for social rights for all. The failure of King’s push for housing and jobs integration in Cicero, Illinois in the summer of 1966 remains a stark metaphor for the United States’ failure to move from civil rights to social rights. National politics became “southernized” after the civil rights victories of 1965, as many northern whites joined Republican resistance to a comprehensive second Reconstruction of social and economic integration, particularly in regard to integrated housing and schools. As with the demise of the first Reconstruction, racial politics would thwart initially promising Great Society experiments aimed at achieving greater social and economic equality.5 The crisis of the left is not only an ideological and discursive one, but also a material one deriving from the transformation of the global political economy. This economic insecurity gave rise to a “white” identity; an identity that well illustrates how some forms of identity politics oppose egalitarian politics. Much of the middle and working strata in democratic capitalist societies fear downward social mobility due to wage-stagnation and rising structural underemployment and unemployment caused by profound economic restructuring. This economic anxiety has contributed to the reluctance on the part of the insecure “included” to legitimate the claims of marginalized, excluded groups. In the United States, ambivalence—and frequent resistance—to the traditional agenda of social democracy (in United States political terms, “social welfare liberalism”) has been particularly acute among whites who fear downward mobility due to deindustrialization. Initially, downwardly mobile white workers did not focus their ire on corporate policies that abandoned production in the industrial Northeast and Midwest in favor of lower labor cost areas not only overseas, but also in the union-free South and Southwest of the United States. Instead, many whites followed the lead of the Republican Party in blaming affirmative action and greedy unions for the loss of good “white” jobs. The conservative reconfiguration of democratic politics derived its ideological legitimacy, in part, from its ability to obfuscate the dismantling of the democratic regulatory state. The conservative state’s cutback on public provision and government regulation often relied on populist conservative appeals to middleand working-class resentment against means-tested social welfare programs. Such programs as AFDC (“welfare”), Food Stamps, and Medicaid disproportionately benefit women, recent immigrants, and children of color—though, of course, the plurality of beneficiaries, to this day, is white. But the right (and neoliberal Democrats complicit in the harsher aspects of the “politics of welfare reform”) convinced many Americans who objectively benefit from social insurance and universal public goods that all public provision promotes indolence and rewards the “undeserving.”6 The right’s popular ideological mantra of “entrepreneurship” and the “free market” as alternative engines of growth to the allegedly stagnant economy of social welfare liberalism helped erode the loyalty of many white ethnic workingand lower-middle-class voters to the New Deal Democratic coalition. The fair and efficient “free market” (and its “universal” agent, the “creative entrepreneurial individual”) long ago replaced social welfare liberalism as the dominant

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ideology of late capitalist democracy. The conservative ideology of “rugged individualism” facilitates popular acceptance of radical inequality of resources and power as “fair and neutral.” It is upon this inegalitarian social terrain that contemporary social “difference” is structured. Progressive taxation and government programs aimed at enhancing the opportunities of poor and working-class families are deemed by conservative ideologues as inherently ineffective, or as institutionalizing “reverse discrimination.” Thus, “difference,” as defined by conservative political ideology and practice, perpetuates the subordination of the many to the unjust demands of the particular few. In reality, what conservative political dominance has accomplished is liberating the privileged (and those who believe they can achieve upward mobility) from any bonds of solidarity with those most vulnerable to the costs of economic transformation. The hegemony of Lockeian liberal individualist ideology in the United States predisposes our society to recognize “difference,” but not class, as a barrier to equality of opportunity. Racism and sexism can be (incorrectly) analyzed as individual forms of discrimination rather than social and structural forms of exclusion. In high school civics, students are frequently taught that if injustice is to be overcome in the United States we must “treat” all groups and individuals as equal. That is, we must fight undemocratic “attitudes.” But how many public educators inform students of the reality that in order to achieve greater equality in the United States, we would have to radically transform the social structures of racial, class, and gender domination? Why is class such an un-American concept (even among allegedly “progressive” academics)? Class can only be analyzed in non-individualist, non-liberal, structural terms, thus violating American ideological proclivities to view the world in individualist, not structural, terms. Class can take on cultural appearances and norms; but class is not as evidently associated with ascribed characteristics of “appearance” as are race and gender. Anyone who has a child attending a public school in a moderate-to-liberal school district knows the prevalence within civics’ curriculums of the liberal discourse of “tolerance”—in regard to “differences” of race, gender, nationality, or (even sometimes) sexuality. But what school district incorporates into its basic social studies curriculum lessons about the major role class inequality plays in American society? And that a crucial form of democratic redistribution of power would involve restoring the right to form free trade unions in the United States workplace (a right denied to workers in the United States much more than to workers in other industrial democracies)? Race and gender discrimination violates liberal presumptions that ascribed characteristics should not influence impartial judges. But the ideology of the market insists that class status is “deserved,” even if inherited (as one “deserves” to inherit the resources that one’s ancestors allegedly fairly earned and deservedly passed on!).

Justice and “Difference”: Does the “Falsely Universal” Invalidate a Democratic, Pluralist (and “Universal”) Conception of Justice? Radical democratic theorists correctly worry that (falsely) universal concepts of identity (such as citizenship or class) can sometimes naturalize and mask the

Can a “Politics of Difference” Achieve Justice? 77 norms of a hegemonic group. Precautions need to be taken, these theorists hold, against deploying “universal” liberal conceptions of “human nature” that mask particularist race, gendered, or classed conceptions of human interests. Iris Marion Young and Susan Hekman, two theorists of “the politics of difference” and “identity,” draw upon their experience of struggles within the feminist movement against a falsely universalizing conception of “women” (i.e. white and middle class) that would negate the distinct social experience and needs of women of color, queer women, and working-class women.7 These two theorists argue that particular groups often embrace distinct concepts of politics, “fairness,” and “justice.” Thus, they contend that imposing universal conceptions of justice upon particular groups may deny these groups the right to develop their conceptions of the good. Universal conceptions of justice often mask the hegemony of a particular, “normed” conception of justice. They further contend that the political acts of social groups are frequently motivated by values and viewpoints that are not universally shared.8 Susan Hekman forthrightly rejects the efforts of Martha Nussbaum, Susan Okin, and other liberal feminists to reconstruct liberalism so that it values the dignity and equal moral worth of women. Rather, Hekman states that an emancipatory political project “must challenge the neutrality and abstraction at the heart of liberalism.” A true politics of diversity (and identity), for Hekman, would reject uniformity and embrace “multiple standards” of justice.9 Young acknowledges that a democratic version of “identity politics” must achieve some common understandings—across group difference—of democratic procedural norms and policies. Young draws upon Habermas’s belief that the human ability to communicate across differences would enable different groups in a pluralist democracy to work out a shared conception of citizenship. Through political conflict and negotiation, a consensus upon basic rules of the democratic game can be achieved (though such norms would always be open to renegotiation). Yet Young’s justly influential work, Justice and the Politics of Difference, highlights many unresolved tensions between her commitment to “difference” and to a democratic egalitarian polity that grants equal moral respect to each citizen. In this major theoretical work, Young advances a trenchant critique of the inordinate focus of liberal theories of justice on the distribution of material goods, as compared to voice, power, and respect. Such theories, she argues, assume an atomistic, consumerist conception of the individual; thus, they fail to recognize that decision-making institutions—which are structured by an undemocratic division of labor—produce social goods. Young contends that a democratic theory of justice should analyze the structure of decision-making within all social institutions. Thus, justice as the overarching conception of a social order should elaborate both the formal and substantive structure of democratic political life.10 Young develops a pluralist conception of justice that aims to erode the practices of domination and exploitation deployed by dominant groups against exploited ones. Young defines domination as the absence of democratic voice in institutional life and exploitation as the absence of control over one’s role within an interdependent social institution. She locates much of democratic insurgent

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activity as transpiring within “new social movements” based on identities of marginality and oppression. Such movements fight not so much for distributional reform, but for greater voice and respect for their particular identity within a pluralist polity.11 Young’s self-defined vision of a democratic community is not one of homogeneity and uniform rights, but of the heterogeneity and differentiated life styles of a “modern, but just city.” In her view, modern urban life involves the mutual toleration of diverse life styles rather than the demand for homogenous behavior on the part of equal citizens. This conception of communal diversity, she contends, mitigates the tendency of traditional liberal and radical theories of justice to posit the autonomous and rational chooser as a disembodied voice of dispassionate reason and disinterestedness. Not only does Young embrace other feminists’ critiques of the liberal, gendered, male conception of rationality, but she also holds that John Rawls’s model of the disinterested rational chooser obscures how individuals actually learn to think about justice and politics through membership in particular groups.12 Young holds that groups are relational and evershifting in composition. Young’s concept of “seriality” contends that a group is a fluid “social collective whose members are unified passively by the relations their actions have to material objects and practices.” Thus, “serial” communities are bound by shared experience, rather than by a uniform consciousness. That is, there is no one “representative” person who represents a group, though groups do exist; and these “groups” express themselves in civil and public life.13 Young’s critique of the disembodied chooser of Kantian theories of justice reiterates an ontological critique made earlier on by theorists such as the communitarian Michael Sandel and radical democrats Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.14 But Young is too sensitive to the intolerance of close-knit communities to opt for a parochial, traditional conception of community. (Although one could argue that Young romanticizes the realities of urban life; cities are often divided by neighborhoods that defend their “turf” and also jealously guard their particular community’s material and cultural resources.) Young advocates for a participatory, diverse conception of community rather than the uniform public of republican imagination offered by such theorists as Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre.15 Young’s critique of both overly-comprehensive and parochial notions of community envisions an alternative democratic pluralist conception of community. But the reader might reasonably query as to whether Young adequately outlines the shared values and practices citizens must embrace across their differences in order to build a democratic society. Seyla Benhabib consistently raises these questions in her sympathetic critiques of postmodern-influenced theories of difference. Benhabib contends that many “theories of difference” downplay the need for democracies to cultivate, via their practices of justice, a “quasiuniversal” conception of “the generalized other” (one’s fellow, yet distinct, citizen) if the solidarity of a democratic egalitarian society is to be achieved.16 If democratic citizens fail to conceive of “others” as sharing some part of their humanity “in common,” then it will be extremely difficult to develop bonds of solidarity across difference.

Can a “Politics of Difference” Achieve Justice? 79 Young’s embrace of “new social movements” offers a powerful critique of the homogenizing and anti-pluralist aspects of both the liberal and radical traditions. But her metaphorical politics of rainbow coalitions eschews a detailed examination of the shared values and politics divergent groups would have to construct together if they were to build a democratic majority. This question is fundamentally a political, rather than abstract metaphysical or ontological conundrum. For example, how do we build bridges between (straight and gay and lesbian) workers fighting for greater power in the workplace and gay men and lesbian women fighting for greater freedom to express their sexuality? A quick example to illustrate the dilemma: while many gay and lesbian people are African-American, the dominant political and cultural institution in that community—the church—has a dominant tradition of homophobia that is being contested by African-American gays and lesbians and their supporters. But such a challenge usually recognizes the rich role the church has played within the movement for African-American liberation.17 Anyone who has done community organizing that draws upon faith-based communities understands that allies on economic justice issues often find themselves on opposite sides of the struggle for reproductive rights. In short, a “politics of difference” in and of itself cannot suffice as a vision and strategy for achieving a democratic society. A political and moral relationship among diverse, but overlapping, reformist projects can be articulated; but such operational unity around a concept of equal moral respect needs to be politically constructed rather than simply assumed. Certainly, distinct policies may be tailored to achieve the differential needs particular groups have for the fulfillment of their members’ basic human capacities. But unless there is some consensus that democratic justice involves the ability of each individual to develop his or her capacities to the fullest extent possible, there can be no democratic majoritarian politics. That is, the “universalist” aspects of the theories of justice offered by John Rawls or Martha Nussbaum or Ronald Dworkin or Amartya Sen (take your pick of a theorist of liberal democratic justice) cannot be totally ignored by activists and theorists committed to “diversity” and “difference,” but also to democratic equality.18 In Young’s later work, she more fully acknowledges the reality of diversity within groups. That is, individuals who identify with a particular group rarely agree on every political and social question affecting the group’s interest.19 Her later warnings against homogenizing the beliefs of group members stands in striking tension with her earlier work’s advocacy of state-recognized forms of group political representation. In her earlier Justice and the Politics of Difference, Young calls upon the state to institutionalize a “group-differentiated, participatory public” in which funding from the state would aid “the self-organization” of group members.20 This would enable disadvantaged “groups” to achieve greater internal cohesion and to increase their political voice, particularly by generating coherent policy proposals. Of course, a democratic state should only fund and recognize groups that are themselves constituted by democratic and pluralist means. While “affirmative” representation of previously excluded or underrepresented groups may be in line with the democratic principle that the power

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or influence of a group should be proportionate to the groups’ democratic numbers, Young goes well beyond advocating state-funding as a means for leveling the playing field of group advocacy. In Justice and the Politics of Difference, Young advocates group veto power regarding policies that affect a group “directly.”21 But, Young fails to outline any mechanisms by which a democratic, pluralist society would determine which groups are affected by what policies. Nor does she acknowledge that allowing for (minority) group veto of democratic legislation could violate the principles of equality embodied by the majoritarian principle. That is, if a minority group can veto policies supported by a democratic majority, does not such veto power grant greater weight to the individuals in the minority group than those members of the majority? And what of the rights of those members of a recognized group who dissent from the views of the majority of the groups’ members? And what of the rights of those who are not members of officially recognized groups or who advance a politics that bridges differences across official (or unofficial) groups? Young fails to analyze all the theoretical and practical challenges “group representation” pose to both democratic and pluralist politics. First, how would a democracy deliberate effectively as to what groups are oppressed or not? A democratic polity that aims to redress the undemocratic exclusion of groups would need to distinguish groups that have been denied democratic forms of representation and equality of opportunity from groups whose claims to having been excluded strike a majority of the polity as spurious. For example, is the democratic polity obligated to provide state aid or proportional representation to anti-liberal groups or groups that violate democratic norms? Should a pluralist democracy provide equal status and protection to groups that limit the autonomy and freedom of their members (and who desire to limit the autonomy and freedom of others)? Should overt (or covert) racists have proportional representation within democratic representational institutions? Or is it politically just that racist sentiment is sufficiently driven underground that overtly racist politicians infrequently get elected to public office? Young’s own designation of “oppressed groups” itself indicates how tricky such a definitional process might be in a democratic society. Young calls for special representation for a panoply of groups: “the disabled, Latinos, AfricanAmerican, Native Americans, Jews, women, gays and lesbians,” and “workers” (whether she means all “workers” or lower-income, non-unionized workers, she does not make clear).”22 Given Jewish-Americans’ disproportionate representation within the professions, many Americans (including this one) would contest describing contemporary American Jews as an “oppressed group,” even though all democrats must still combat latent and overt forms of anti-Semitism. And while the common experience of anti-Asian racism has helped constitute a “panAsian” identity among ethnic and national groups that historically have been divided by nationality in Asia itself, the differentials in class, immigrant, and educational status among Asian-Americans makes “group representation” for Asians (or, in an undifferentiated manner, all “Latinos” or perhaps even “all” African-Americans) somewhat problematic. Young frequently refers to the heterogeneous nature of the modern, cosmopolitan city to illustrate her

Can a “Politics of Difference” Achieve Justice? 81 conception of group-based, democratic polities. But her vision ignores the complex nature of group identity and membership in today’s cosmopolitan world, as well as some of the less attractive aspects of solidaristic ethnic politics. Young’s vague proposals for “group representation” would have difficulty navigating the “divergences” that always exist within “diverse” groups. To steal a phrase from Amartya Sen, in the late modern world social reality is better described as “divergent diversity” (e.g. diversity within diverse groups) rather than simple “diversity.”23 On what basis would Young argue against undemocratic groups garnering official state recognition and political representation? She might claim that they do not share a history of oppression, domination, or marginalization. But would not the democratic polity as a whole have to make the (contentious) decisions as to what groups should gain “affirmative” representation because they historically have been denied the basic rights of citizens? Would not such decisions be based upon some majoritarian (cross-group) conception of what constitutes exclusion and inclusion? And to achieve such a conception of “affirmative” representation would the polity not first have to establish a stable, majoritarian consensus as to the (universal?) critieria that constitute a violation of a group’s democratic rights? Thus, any conceivable democratic politics of difference cannot solely depend upon a simple, unmediated affirmation of “difference.” If it is to be democratic, it must remain parasitic upon universal democratic values. That is, democratic pluralism (or “difference”) cannot avoid an embrace of democratic, as well as pluralist, principles, if groups are to care about the interests of others outside their group. Absent such a spirit of solidarity across groups, the “politics of difference” can readily degenerate into an undemocratic “war of each all against all” (as it has in non-liberal polities in parts of the Balkans, Central Asia, and Africa). More crucially, how would—or should—the state structure “group” representation, given the complex social cross-cleavages characteristic of “groups” in a complex society—and the diversity of opinion within almost any “group.” And would the state or the self-constituting group determine the structure of group membership, deliberation, and representation? For example, if all female citizens voted for “women’s representatives” such leaders might not be ardent feminists. On the other hand, should not (diverse) feminist groups get to organize and militate for their view of “women’s” interests, regardless of the opinions of “non-feminist” women? Group representation schemes both run-up against the problems posed by the existence of ideological, moral, and political diversity within groups and also by the social difference between organized groups advocating for a particular constituency and the actual sociological constituency advocacy groups or social movements claim to represent. Perhaps this is why even a state far more democratic and inclusive than the contemporary United States might well leave group representation to the voluntary activities of self-constituted groups in both civil society and the political sphere. A brief examination of any policy issue over which a “group veto” might be exercised readily reveals the conundrums such a veto policy would pose for a democratic pluralist society. First off, multiple, conflicting groups can validly

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claim that a policy change will affect their group. Which group(s) gets a veto and which one(s) does not? Who decides? For example, recent changes in “welfare policy” affected low-income, single-parent women of all races, but disproportionately women (and children) of color (though the plurality of welfare recipients remain white). So which group of recipients should have a veto power? On the other hand, other interests are affected by income-support policies, including the taxpayers who fund such programs. Also, individuals (both within and without state-recognized groups) are likely to hold conflicting opinions in regard to such policies. As Amy Gutmann argues in Identity and Democracy, “identity politics” theorists often forget that political ideology and beliefs can constitute a shared political identity that cross-cuts ascriptive or structurally-constituted (e.g. class) forms of identity.24 That is, political identity and beliefs are not neatly congruent with other forms of identity. Progressives will appeal to those working in the formal labor market to support income-support policies for non-working parents with children. These opponents of “workfare” argued that forcing relatively unskilled single mothers into the formal labor force would undercut the wages and social benefits of those working in the formal sector. In addition, they would point out that single parents who already work in the low-wage sector of the labor market often cannot afford child care and health care. On the other hand, more universal-oriented social democrats might contend that it is fair for all parents with young infants to be required to participate in the formal labor market, but if and only if universal child care and after-school programs are well-structured, adequately funded, and available to all working parents. Of course, the contemporary dilemma may well be: What if such programs do not exist? In contrast, conservatives appeal to working people—of all races and classes—to oppose “welfare” by claiming that “welfare” created a dependent “culture of poverty” and raised the tax burden of the gainfully employed. Which of these three “groups” should have a veto over “welfare policy”? Bracket the quality of these “scare-crowish” political arguments, the unanswered question remains: who decides which self-proclaimed affected group gets a veto over policies (allegedly or really) affecting them? Who adjudicates claims by groups that a policy directly affects them (as almost any policy distributes costs and benefits unevenly across groups)? Should suburban taxpayers have a veto power over a redistribution of educational resources from well-funded suburban schools to under-funded inner city schools? Is it just that suburban school districts already have a “veto-power” in regard to accepting into their schools lower income and minority children from other school districts? Should wealthy taxpayers (who will—and do—claim that they are disproportionately “productive”) have a group veto over redistributive tax and spending policies that would raise their tax burden? Under Young’s “veto-power” concept how could a (potential) democratic majority reject the “veto power” of any self-constituted group that objected to a given policy? No democratic polity can survive if policy-decisions are completely farmed out to particular communities (or unilateral vetoes granted). In fact, one could well argue that American federalism has resulted in geographic racial and class

Can a “Politics of Difference” Achieve Justice? 83 segregation that excessively “farms out” policy to particular groups. In the United States we “farm out” the funding and provision of the most essential public good—public education—to (more often than not) racially and class exclusive local government entities. America’s peculiar commitment to decentralized federalism allows affluent suburbs to have autonomy over basic educational, recreational, and public service goods. This results in a peculiar form of “raced and classed” public goods. The United States has many “little suburban Swedens,” with the difference being that real Sweden is more diverse racially and economically than our islands of affluent suburban social democracy, with their high tax bases and excellent public libraries, schools, cultural events, and parks. But these islands of social democracy are restricted to those upper-middle-class families who can “buy” their way in. What the United States lacks is the universal provision of high-quality public education—yet alone the universal provision of health care. Such decentralized “difference” or “local autonomy” does not promote egalitarian democracy, but rather stratified, unjust “difference.” The above is not to argue against the importance of social pluralism to a free, democratic and egalitarian society. Pluralist democrats comprehend the role that membership in particular cultural communities can play in facilitating the selfdevelopment of citizens. But such an understanding of the social constitution of identity should not lead pluralist democrats to support state tolerance (let alone funding) for cultural or identity groups that are racist, sexist, or homophobic. Will Kymlicka convincingly argues that political and cultural autonomy for minorities can be justified within a pluralist democracy, if the previous violation of these cultures (such as those of indigenous peoples) denuded their members of the self-respect and resources necessary for individual self-development. But such minority rights (or ethnic or national autonomy) must be “consistent with respect for freedom and autonomy of individuals.” That is, group rights in liberal democracies must serve the aims of promoting the (universal) right of all democratic citizens to equal political voice, liberty, and opportunity. Thus, claims for autonomy based on national origin, immigrant or religious status cannot be used to relegate women and children, against their own will, to membership in patriarchal and abusive communities of origin.25 These weaknesses in Young’s schema for “representation of difference” affirm Susan Bickford’s contention that Young’s group veto policy would “vitiate the need to persuade others of the justness of claims.”26 If democracy is the only just way for diverse individuals and groups to make mutually-binding decisions, then can democracy survive if particular groups can veto majority decisions? This is not to say that democrats should not consider—and possibly advocate—policies that would redress the maldistribution of political and economic resources that favor the interests of the wealthy and powerful over the poor and powerless. But it is only through the mobilization of democratic numbers—the hard work of ideological contestation and coalition building—that such policies can be democratically achieved. And only a diverse, majoritarian coalition committed to democratic equality could implement such policies. In addition, any majority in favor of such “affirmative actions” would likely conceive of such policies as timelimited efforts to achieve democratic equality. For democratic equality cannot

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permanently co-exist with systematic legislative efforts to advantage some groups over others. Perhaps due to belated recognition of some of the above difficulties, Young’s more recent work, Inclusion and Democracy, cautions against “fixing and reifying” group membership and group representation. In clear distinction to her earlier “group representation” schemes for policy “vetoes,” Young here explicitly rejects fixing the number of legislative seats to be held by “oppressed groups” through the use of either “quotas” or “special districts.” She argues that quotas for minorities—or special districts—tend to freeze representation and reify groups into homogenous entities. Nor does she revisit her decade-earlier call for “groups” to have “veto power” over policies that affect their interests.27 In her later work, Young’s Habermasian (quasi-universalist) side begins to win out over the over-emphasis on “difference” in her earlier work. In Identity and Democracy, Young continually reminds her readers of the need for groups to appeal to others outside their group; she continually asserts that her vision of “communicative democracy” requires groups to advance distinct narrative strategies (which can be “translated” by others) within a common, public, deliberative life. She urges a politics in which groups move beyond particularist assertions of “I want” to “public, deliberative” appeals for “what I am entitled to” by just policies.28 Young’s expression of faith that groups can translate their desires across cultural differences leads Susan Hekman to take Young’s Inclusion and Democracy to task for abandoning Young’s earlier commitment to a true “politics of difference.”29 Young, in her writings published shortly before the tragic loss of her battle with cancer, no longer advocated fixed group representations, but instead supported “mandates within representative institutions that place marginalized groups closer to power.”30 Drawing on the work of Lani Guiner, Young favors the creation of multi-member legislative districts that would use proportional representation to facilitate representation of constituencies that felt marginalized or excluded by winner-take all majoritarian politics.31 Of course, only if “groups” choose to voluntarily self-organize into politics would they gain such representation. Guinier, a consistent advocate of cross-racial coalition politics (despite the misrepresentation of her by conservative critics), contends that such group representation, if voluntarily achieved through the political use of proportional representation, would still necessitate the building of cross-group majority coalitions in order to pass desired legislation.32 For only democratic majorities that can bridge “differences” through a shared commitment to specific policy objectives can achieve a redistribution of power and resources. Young’s abandoning of state institutional guarantees of “group representation,” represents an implicit recognition that while pluralist democracy should include a vigorous public role for associational groups, the state should neither codify their existence nor control who represents them politically. In fact, it is not clear if formal group representation enhances grass-roots democratic voice or rather simply enhances the power of new elites claiming to represent groups.33 Research on consociational democracy reveals that state-sanctioned group representation (via ethnic or linguistically based parties) often empowers “elite”

Can a “Politics of Difference” Achieve Justice? 85 identity-entrepreneurs more than it does rank-and-file members of the allegedly represented groups. The same phenomenon (of self-appointed “group entrepreneurs”) has been noted by studies of the role of ethnic advisory councils in British local government.34 Anyone who has studied the politics of contemporary identity-based social movements realizes that there are numerous (and complex) divisions among and within “groups” as to both their composition and their respective interests and policy-preferences. In order to insure voice for disadvantaged groups, democratic political parties have often embraced goals or quotas for female or minority candidates (even cabinet members), so as to insure that the constituencies the “parties” represent include traditionally disempowered ones.35 Public life in the United States regularly makes rhetorical gestures to the role for “diversity” in democratic society. But, ironically, it performs poorly in regard to the percentage of women (and people of modest economic means) in elected office at both the state and national level. This partly derives from the United States not having a strong left party with ties to a vigorous labor movement. Historically—in an admittedly imperfect manner—it has been parties of the left that have given voice to the powerless. Another cause is a weak party system that requires candidates for office to raise money from wealthy sources (and white men tend to do this best). Also, the absence of proportional representation in the United States is another barrier to more diverse legislative representation. Parties committed to a diversity of representation can choose to put at the top of their candidate lists representatives of historically under-represented groups.36 Even if the democratic state should not formally organize “groups” into politics, this does not preclude identity-based groups from having a strong political role in a pluralist democracy. In contrast to Habermas’s conception of “public deliberation” as necessitating that deliberators divorce themselves from particular conceptions of their interest, Young correctly stresses the role that identitybased (and other voluntary) associational groups should play in an egalitarian, pluralist democracy. She endorses Nancy Fraser’s view that “subaltern” counterpublics are crucial sites both for the subordinated groups to clarify their social and political outlook (in a social space free from domination by others) and from which to organize to affect policy.37 But if these groups are to affect democratic public policy they must convince others beyond their group. Many feminists correctly assert that only with equitably funded, high-quality universal health, child, and elder care will women truly be free and equal citizens. But such demands can only be won politically by forming coalitions with other groups, such as unions and community and ethnic organizations that represent adults who may not identity themselves primarily as feminists, but, rather, as parents trying to balance the demands of work and care-giving. Most liberal and radical democratic theorists leave group political activity to the realm of voluntary associations (be they identity, interest, or religiously based groups) not solely because state-recognition is itself a “mark of power,” but also because the redistribution of power and resources among and within groups only can be resolved (if not permanently solved) by free, democratic, associational life. Only by the voluntary political work of building broad-based

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majoritarian coalitions can particular, heretofore subordinated groups, win social gains that are legitimated and institutionalized. Amy Gutmann’s discussion of the importance of groups that “identify” with justice reminds us that to redress the historic injustices committed against particular “groups” in the United States necessitated the support of individuals who did not belong to those excluded groups. Sometimes disruptive strategies (such as strikes, civil disobedience, and even civil unrest) are necessary on the part of excluded minorities to call attention to grievances “organized out of politics” by dominant elites. But ultimately, in a democracy, minorities will need allies—those who are not members of the excluded or oppressed group but who believe in egalitarian political norms and who are willing to organize on behalf of the rights of the excluded within their own communities, unions, and political parties.38 In most advanced industrial democracies (including the United States in the 1930s and 1960s) egalitarian reforms have been instituted by coalitions that brought together groups representing disempowered individuals and groups representing middle-strata individuals of consciousness. The glue that held such coalitions together had elements of both material interest (the broad benefits that social welfare programs brought to citizens) and the ideal interests of a shared normative conception of the social rights due to democratic citizens. These social rights—the programmatic basis of much of democratic, insurgent politics—are entitled to all by basis of their common citizenship, not on the basis of particular identities. Conservative success in eviscerating unions and de-legitimating any political challenge to the hegemony of the market has played a central causal role in curtailing these social rights and in increasing material inequality. What too few advocates of a “politics of difference” realize is that such growing inequality renders “difference” less empowering than it would be in a more egalitarian society.

Can a “Politics of Difference” Reject “Illiberal Difference”? Young may not adequately grapple with the tensions that inevitably arise in politics between the norms of democratic justice and practices of “difference” that are illiberal or anti-democratic; but she is well aware of such tensions. Susan Hekman, a self-avowed “identity politics” feminist theorist, seems oblivious to them in her ardent argument that a state that values “difference” and “identity” should guarantee the rights of citizens to engage in illiberal practices, if such practices are central to their group “identity.” Hekman praises the Supreme Court decision in Wisconsin v. Yoder that permits the Amish to exempt their children from truancy laws. She claims that this decision affirms the protection of particular ways of life in a “non-liberal,” but “emancipatory” manner that values the “politics of identity.” She praises the decision for permitting particular conceptions of morality to flourish within a polity that values difference over homogeneity.39 But how would Hekman’s logic in celebrating Wisconsin v. Yoder allow her to criticize, in a logically consistent manner, a pluralist society providing state protection to a particular community’s practice of female genital cutting or a community’s practice of male family members executing female

Can a “Politics of Difference” Achieve Justice? 87 relatives who were victims of rape. That is, what does the militant defender of “group autonomy” and “identity politics” say regarding group practices that blatantly violate the equal moral worth of persons? Once one goes down the road— as Hekman implicitly does—of condemning democratic principles of justice as repressive, “universal,” and homogenizing, a consistent defense of human freedom becomes extremely difficult. Amy Gutmann and Susan Okin, in a more nuanced manner, struggle with how pluralist democrats who respect “difference” should conceive of state policy toward illiberal groups. Gutmann rejects any state funding or official sanction of the practices of illiberal groups, but implies that the liberal democratic state may choose to tolerate voluntary organizations that embrace such beliefs, but only if it can be demonstrated that their members have an effective right of exit. Hence, she contends that illiberal groups should not have a right to control their own children’s education. That is, they cannot deny their children the right to a public education that teaches the skills necessary for self-reflection.40 This position situates Gutmann more on the democratic side of the tension within “liberal democracy.” In contrast, liberal democrats who prioritize “liberal” tolerance hold that illiberal groups should be tolerated by a liberal democratic society if they do not proselytize beyond their community or pose a threat to the liberal freedoms of those outside their community.41 Okin embraces a more thorough-going democratic critique of multiculturalists who would tolerate illiberal groups within a democratic pluralist society. She unequivocally states that conflicts between liberal democratic values and particularist racist or patriarchal practices can only be democratically resolved by the state banning such anti-liberal practices.42 Some liberal democratic pluralists might judge Okin as falling too far on the democratic side of the liberal democratic tension. But Hekman (and sometimes Young) seems oblivious to these troubling questions about the status of anti-liberal “groups” within a liberal democratic polity. Perhaps avoiding the consideration of these (rather obvious) dilemmas allows them to assume that a vibrant “politics of difference” will never conflict with the values of democratic citizenship. But if a theorist takes these issues seriously, then he or she must recognize that the liberal democratic values of freedom of association, equal liberty, and equal political voice sometimes must trump particular conceptions of the good life that violate liberal democratic values. In short, “difference,” by itself, cannot be the basis for a politics of democratic justice. Certainly, even those liberal democrats who defend the rights of illiberal “voluntary associations” to exist in civil society, would oppose state support for religious and cultural groups that violate individual freedom. A democratic state should not fund (or allow use of state facilities to) groups that practice racist or patriarchal exclusion. Gutmann contends that while the liberal democratic state should not ban a voluntary association such as the Boy Scouts from practicing homophobic exclusion, it should deny such groups the use of state-funded facilities, such as public school meeting space. Gutmann reminds her readers that the liberal democratic state must not only protect religious freedom, but also must be free from religious colonization of the secular state. And religious colonizers

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of secular institutions often carry out their intrusions in the name of granting an equal voice for their “different” perspective. In the United States, the allegedly secular state has been colonized by illiberal religious groups, particularly in school districts where “creationism” and “abstinence education” are mandated topics of instruction. Strong advocates of democracy might even contend that the liberal democratic state should require private educational institutions to expose their students to “democratic educational” precepts. Should statedesigned (and taught) courses in self-reflective, “critical thinking” and religious and cultural pluralism be required of students attending non-liberal, religious educational institutions? Currently, our polity permits educational autonomy for private orthodox Jewish, Islamic, Catholic, and Protestant fundamentalist educational institutions, without requiring children to be exposed to any public instruction that might pose challenges to their particular community’s conception of morality. Given the predominance of liberal over democratic norms in the United States, it is likely that “one way” protection of religious communities from the state will continue to predominate in public policy toward religious education and practice. Shalom Lappin argued in a recent issue of Dissent that a liberal democratic society may choose to tolerate the practices of an anti-liberal community, providing that illiberal community does not actively proselytize and recruit outsiders. (Such a condition does not seem to apply to American tolerance of Mormonism, Lubavitcher Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other proselytizing religious sects.) That is, liberal democracies may choose to be tolerant to antiliberal groups that do not threaten the liberties of the vast majority of citizens.43 Yet Gutmann rightly reminds us that such tolerance may sacrifice the children of these communities to a form of traditional education that will limit their ability to freely choose whether to stay in these communities as adults. The question of whether and to what extent a liberal democratic society should tolerate illiberal, allegedly (or actual) voluntary associations in civil society is a vexing question, with no one “right” answer to which all liberal democrats would subscribe. But such difficult choices demonstrate that in the name of “difference” and “pluralism” a liberal democratic society may end up being quite (too?) tolerant of illiberal particular communities that engage in patriarchal, racist, and/or homophobic practices. But what such problematic issues further demonstrate is that not all forms of “difference” are inherently emancipatory and democratic. Will Kymlicka contends that a liberal democratic society should take affirmative measures to preserve cultures that have been oppressed or discriminated against by prior state action. The democratic polity should consider granting cultural and political autonomy to such groups, if such measures are needed to revive those cultures. Kymlicka argues that these policies of cultural pluralism are in accord with the values of liberal democracy because cultural membership in a particular group often provides the individual with the meaning, goals, and vision that allow him or her to flourish. Thus, Kymlicka holds that the democratic polity has a positive, affirmative obligation to restore (relative) autonomy for cultures eviscerated by past state practices. But contrary to strong advocates

Can a “Politics of Difference” Achieve Justice? 89 of a “politics of difference,” Kymlicka also states that a liberal democratic society can and should repress the practices of anti-liberal associations that threaten the freedom of others, including those of their own members.44 When racist groups express their “difference” by physically or psychologically harassing others, the state must step in and repress that expression of anti-democratic “difference.” That is, democracy must ultimately choose the moral value of individual choice over preserving culture for a culture’s sake. Other liberal democracies more militantly practice two-way protection of the state from religious colonization—few European democracies would require mandated time for creationism in science classes within a public educational system. The American liberal tradition has led to public policies favoring freedom in civil society for undemocratic forms of associational life (and the ability to reproduce these ways of life through these communities privatizing and controlling the education of their children). Implicitly, the practices of the American polity place the liberal value of pluralism ahead of the democratic value of educating children to be capable of autonomous choice. This is a pragmatic compromise that American liberal democrats may choose to make; but it is not one fully consonant with democratic norms. In short, a democratic regime cannot be “neutral” as to those background social, political, and economic conditions necessary for the cultivation of individual freedom. For example, a democratic polity cannot avoid deliberating as to whether to tolerate particular communities that require their adolescent female members to undergo clitorectimies. Instead, a democratic society must judge whether or not an adolescent would be likely to freely choose such a procedure if they were aware of the possibility of avoiding it, while remaining a respected member of society. Is it “illiberal” to decide that girls below the age of majority should not be required to undergo such a procedure? Or should the liberal democratic state only inform such girls of the alternative (and enforce their right to choose it), but still allow adolescent girls once counseled of their right to say “no” to still make a “choice”? How much of a “choice” is it (even with greater information provided) if their home community will shun the girl if she chooses not to have the procedure? Would banning the practice enhance liberal freedom or set back the ability to acculturate future generations of that illiberal community to the norms of a liberal democratic society? Seyla Benhabib suggests that a pluralist democracy might work with the particular community in question to introduce new coming-of-age rituals for their adolescent girls that do not involve genital cutting.45 But what if the leaders of that community (one in which power is not democratically constructed) reject these suggestions and insist on control over their adolescent girls’ bodies? Would it be cultural imperialism for the democratic state to ban such practices? Whatever the best or most practical solution to this dilemma, a serious liberal democrat cannot glibly support unqualified tolerance of illiberal cultural practices. A defense of “difference” for its own sake certainly cannot on its own yield a democratic politics.

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“Democracy and ‘Difference’ ”: Or, How Radically Pluralistic can Democracy Be? The tension between democracy’s universal norms and the “particularist” conceptions of justice affirmed by advocates of a “politics of difference” further play themselves out in debates about affirmative action. A democratic defense of affirmative action argues that traditional modes of selection and recruitment for selective or scarce positions in society are often biased in ways that fail to identify “qualified” minority or female applicants. That is, standard selection procedures often fail to select women or minorities who have the ability to perform the relevant job well or the characteristics needed to take advantage of the scarce educational opportunity in question. As the argument goes, either the traditional modes of selection fail to identify all qualified applicants or the selection criteria are themselves biased or applied in a biased manner. Only affirmative efforts can rectify these failures. Yet some defenders of affirmative action hold that past or present discrimination against excluded minorities justifies “reverse discrimination” in favor of minority candidates. That is, “affirmative action” does not aim to insure that “fair” judgment is applied to all candidates; rather, significantly distinct criteria should be used to judge the candidacy of individuals from oppressed groups. Such a defense, I contend below, is neither just nor politically sustainable within a democratic polity. Iris Marion Young endorses the logic of “reverse discrimination” by defending affirmative action as redress for current, rather than past, oppression (as she believes today’s citizens are unlikely to accept blame for injustices done by their predecessors). Young rejects defending affirmative action as “fair,” as she believes that “universal” arguments cannot support policies that should treat groups in a differential manner.46 Young implies that judging individuals from differently empowered groups by allegedly fair and universal criteria will only reproduce inequality. She urges her readers to recognize that “Equality defined as the participation and inclusion of all groups in institutions and positions is sometimes better served by differential treatment.”47 She recommends that advocates of affirmative action readily admit that such policies overtly “discriminate” in favor of previously oppressed groups. That is, affirmative action policies should redistribute task-defining positions of power to groups that are presently under-represented in these positions. But Young’s argument is unlikely to convince members of allegedly nonoppressed groups to employ admittedly discriminatory procedures to distribute positions of power. Why should members of privileged groups ensure that oppressed groups achieve proportional selection to scarce positions or places? Affirmative action policies cannot be achieved in a democratic society simply by asserting that oppressed groups should have proportional representation in jobs that involve “task-definition.” One also has to convince a majority that members of oppressed groups have been unfairly denied access to such jobs and places in selective educational institutions. Proportionality may well be a valued goal; but if scarce talents or abilities are involved in the execution of the task at hand (say precise surgery), then selection criteria, even if admittedly “socially constructed”

Can a “Politics of Difference” Achieve Justice? 91 and open to redefinition, must be deemed by a sustainable political majority as identifying qualified candidates. Young’s belief in “discriminatory” affirmative action is an overt rejection of the standard democratic justification of affirmation action—that by refining and modifying traditional selection criteria “affirmative action” identifies “qualified” candidates who are often overlooked by traditional, but biased selection criteria. Most defenders of affirmation action (correctly, in my view) claim that only by constraining decision-makers to make special efforts to identify qualified women and people of color can society achieve substantive “equality of opportunity.” Most white male university faculty over fifty, even in the social sciences and humanities, can remember when faculties were overwhelmingly white and male. Absent affirmative efforts, it is likely that “old boy” networks would have continued to reproduce themselves. But most defenders of affirmative efforts— which have had some success in regard to gender integration, but only very modest gains in regard to racial integration of higher education faculties— believe that the quality of the faculty has also markedly improved due to these affirmative efforts. Certainly, few would argue that the uniformed services and construction trades are less “skilled” today because affirmative action has led to greater representation of minorities and women in these professions. (Here, women tend to be more underrepresented than are men of color.) Young never adequately explains why she abjures more traditional defenses of affirmative action. Her argument in favor of proportional representation rather than individuated fair consideration appears to derive from her distinction between liberal conceptions of discrimination and radical conceptions of oppression. In Young’s view, while discrimination is exercised against individual agents, “oppression” consists of “systematic institutional processes that preclude some people from learning and using satisfying and expansive skills in socially useful settings.”48 Thus, if affirmative action is to redress oppression it must not only eliminate discrimination; it must also achieve proportional distribution of task-defining positions in the division of labor. Young appears to believe that all “merit” criteria are arbitrary and that, therefore, more powerful “task-defining” positions in the social division of labor should be distributed proportionally among relevant social groups. (Again Young does not seem to recognize how contentious it would be to determine which groups are entitled to the proportional holding of such societal roles.) Young granting primacy to proportional group representation in the holding of task-executing jobs runs up against traditional defenses of affirmative action that focus primarily on “fair” treatment of all applicants. Traditional affirmative action advocates (of which I call myself) contend that by interrogating and redefining merit or selection criteria—rather than abolishing them completely— institutions can more fairly identify those who are qualified to exercise the relevant tasks at hand. Such reconceived selection criteria might involve recognizing the merit of those who overcome adverse barriers to acquiring the relevant abilities; the willingness to serve underrepresented populations; or the need to supplement imprecise and culturally-biased—though not necessarily completely arbitrary—standardized tests with more qualitative evidence of potential. These

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affirmative action policies aim to achieve fair and equal consideration that respects the equal individual moral worth of applicants. Young begrudgingly admits that even in a democratic division of labor there would be a role for experts.49 Let us assume that there is only a limited need for expertise in the professions and that such expertise is, in part, “socially constructed.” Even so, Young does not advance any alternative criteria for selection, other than perhaps a lottery guaranteeing proportional representation of socially-recognized groups. Would not it be more likely that a democratic society might support a redefinition of selection qualifications than their seeming abolition in favor of proportional selection? Young fails to see that if hegemonic groups find the arguments of the subordinate unconvincing than the subordinate will likely stay that way. According to Young, the liberal justification of affirmative action as redressing imperfections in meritocratic procedures only creates resentment against women and minority holders of such places as “unqualified.” Young thus holds that the defense of affirmative action necessitates the total deconstruction of the concept of merit. Young here erroneously implies that a belief in “social construction” of merit logically entails a belief that all criteria of merit are “arbitrary.” But would Young consciously argue that manual dexterity has nothing to do with the qualifications for being a surgeon or that applicants for voice training at Julliard might be required to carry a tune. And unjustly accused litigants may justifiably wish that the legal profession be diverse; but also that the diverse group of defense lawyers are skilled investigators and litigators. (I’m both tonedeaf and challenged in regard to fine motor skills; even in the most democratic and egalitarian of societies it would be fair to exclude me from the People’s Chorus and, certainly, from operating on my fellow citizens.) Young argues that affirmative action can only be adequately (and successfully?) defended if we reject the ideological concept of liberal meritocracy in favor of belief in a “democratic division of labor.” A community committed to eroding the division of labor between task-defining and task-executing labor will want, Young holds, to insure broad access to the more prestigious task defining professions (while also working to lessen the exclusivity of task-defining jobs). Only a community’s commitment to democratic distribution of power, she implies, can sustain support for affirmative action and special political representation for historically excluded communities. Radical democrats (such as myself) would concur with Young that many defenses of “meritocracy” function as ideological justifications for undemocratic (and unnecessary) forms of hierarchy. But one can favor efforts to erode the division between task-defining and task-executing labor without insisting that all conceptions of expertise and selection qualifications for scarce positions or places are irrational, unnecessary, or unjust. Democratic efforts to erode an unnecessarily hierarchical division of labor—if they are to be efficacious—must work to achieve a social consensus as to appropriate qualifications for a given job or educational opportunity. Once we achieve a consensus that not every one can exercise any and every task within a complex division of labor, then just (and fairly applied) selection criteria must be “socially

Can a “Politics of Difference” Achieve Justice? 93 constructed.” The sociological recognition that “qualifications” are “socially constructed” need not elide into the belief that all “selection criteria” are inherently arbitrary. Would Young argue that a relatively mathematically-challenged individual (such as this author) could be a superb engineer (or a graphicallychallenged person an architect)? If not, then glib equations of the “social construction” of merit or qualification with the “arbitrariness” of all qualifications must be ruled out of serious consideration. Democrats should work to lessen the division between those whose work involves discretionary judgment and authority over others and those whose work primarily involves carrying out the orders of persons in authority. But re-conceptualizing the division of labor will involve considerably more democratic deliberation and struggle than is implied by a simplistic assumption that all conceptions of expertise and judgment are inherently “arbitrary” and thus would “wither away” in a radical democracy. In short, a viable public philosophy defending affirmative action must engage in serious argument as to what constitutes merit or desert in a liberal democratic society. A viable defense of affirmative action would also acknowledge that distinct criteria of just distribution exist for different types of scarce positions. Nor can we defend affirmative action absent a discussion of what constitutes discrimination—both past and present. Totally divorcing the distribution of professional and technical positions from considerations of merit or desert would inevitably set off divisive, competing claims of proportional group representation. This is not some neo-conservative pipedream, as Young implies. Many “failed states” suffer from the kleptocratic efforts of particular ethnic, religious, or linguistic groups to usurp control over university, professional, and governmental positions. Rampant, non-democratic, pluralistic place-grabbing can and has replaced democratic criteria of selection absent a democratic consensus in favor of just selection criteria for scarce places or jobs. Anyone who teaches white working-class students at a modestly selective institution of higher education realizes that a democratic consensus behind affirmative action is lacking in our society. If rejected for admission to selective professional school or graduate programs, white students do not blame the other white students who out-competed them for 85 percent of the limited places at stake. Rather they obsessively focus on the students of color who take up, at most, 15 percent of the places (and not all of whom were admitted via affirmation action measures). One might term this reaction the “disabled parking space” phenomenon. Those of us who are able-bodied drivers have experienced entering a crowded parking lot in which all spaces are taken other than a few spots reserved for drivers with physical disabilities. Instead of cursing out the nine-hundred-and-ninety-seven able-bodied drivers who beat us out for those nine-hundred-and-ninety-seven spots, we curse the policy that reserves three unfilled spots for disabled people. Class discrimination by no means subsumes all forms of racial and gender discrimination—and thus affirmative consideration must be given to candidates for scarce places who are persons of color and/or women. But the failure of affirmative action policy to consider the structural barriers that class inequality poses

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to equality of opportunity violates the intuitive sense of many poor and workingclass whites that they also face structural barriers to equality of opportunity. Thus unless affirmative action policies include a class-based element they are unlikely to garner stable majoritarian support. Highly selective, elite undergraduate and graduate institutions of higher learning have all too few working-class and poor persons—of all races—in attendance. Affirmative action policies that consider the specific past and present barriers to opportunity that each candidate has confronted will create broader support for affirmative action than will the hierarchical, ordinal ranking of oppressions. In order for Young’s “different” communities to share a commitment to redistributing social, political, and economic power, a strong democratic consensus would have to exist across groups as to what constitutes just distributional criteria for scarce positions. Young never offers clear reasons as to why the members of her “ideal city” of strangers—individuals whom she believes constitute their identities primarily by their membership in particular groups—would feel any shared bonds of citizenship with “strangers.”50 She rejects the tight solidarity of communitarian visions of “strong democracy” in favor of a radical pluralism in which particular communities develop both their distinct identities and their capacity to act as sympathetic (if not empathetic) citizens. But would not majority support for affirmative action necessitate diverse citizens embracing a democratic conception of social justice far more empathetic than the indifference of city strangers would permit. That is, Young never adequately reconciles her radical pluralist attachment to “difference” and “group identity” with her residual commitment to social democratic conceptions of justice. Such redistributive policies would not be a public affirmation of “the politics of difference,” but of social solidarity across difference. Such a sense of solidarity cannot be achieved simply by philosophic argument; it can only result from democratic political contestation and mobilization on the part of oppressed groups and their more privileged allies. To be successful such mobilization would have to win over some of the slightly and greatly advantaged strata not solely for pragmatic reasons (though elites often make concessions to preserve social stability). Historically, progressive sectors of the middle class (particularly those involved in the helping professions and journalists and intellectuals) and dissident members of the privileged class (affectionately known by those who raise money for progressive causes as “traitors to their class”) have played a crucial role in struggles for democratic justice. If equal social rights are ever to be achieved in the United States, neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools will have to be more class and racially-integrated. Thus, the supra-community of Young’s “strangers” may not suffice as a model for a polity in which members of diverse groups interact daily, develop bonds of cross-communal solidarity, and endorse public policies that will further diversify inadequately integrated neighborhoods. How to achieve such moral and political solidarity is a question that Young’s (justifiably recognized) work fails to address.

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Going Overboard on “Difference”: The Rejection of Cross-Group Conceptions of Democracy and Justice Young’s work is informed by a powerful commitment to marry her commitment to socialist equality with cultural diversity. Yet she fails to confront head-on the intellectual and political tensions between her particularist and universalist commitments. Yet, to her credit, she does not elide over these tensions. In contrast, theorists who unqualifiedly embrace the values of identity and difference sometimes eschew any coherent commitment to the core democratic value: the equal moral worth of persons. Thus, their theoretical work embraces forms of radical pluralism that mirror earlier liberal pluralism’s inability to critique structural material (and educational and social) inequality between individuals and among groups. For example, Susan Hekman in Private Selves, Public Identities: Reconsidering Identity Politics overtly rejects universal conceptions of justice in favor of a “politics of identity.” Hekman wishes us to answer “yes” to her rhetorical critique of the “falsely universal” conceptions of liberal justice and citizenship: “Why not then, jettison the generic citizen? Why not focus on differences rather than uniformity?” She holds that each group’s particular conception of justice should be given unilateral moral consideration within an allegedly democratic polity.51 But does this mean that each group should have autonomy over matters of justice within their own community? What of social relationships between members of different cultural and identity-based communities? What of internal relationships within communities that are patriarchal or racist in their practices? Hekman enthusiastically embraces “identity politics” as an emancipatory strategy that affirms the identity of “embodied, particular, and situated” citizens, while rejecting as the primary enemy the neutral, autonomous, and falsely universal liberal citizen.52 Hekman goes beyond a critique made by Young, Okin, and others that traditional liberal conceptions of citizenship are gendered and raced and thus embrace a subjective (male and white) perspective on justice. Only a politics that embraces difference and abandons all conceptions of universal or shared interests can be liberating, according to Hekman.53 Her target is not just Rawls, but also those theorists of difference, who while influenced by deconstruction, still embrace radical democratic conceptions of democracy and equality. Hekman focuses her sights on Iris Marion Young because while Young embraces the value of “difference,” she also endorses Habermas’s belief that in a truly “communicative democracy” citizens can develop a shared conception of justice.54 Hekman rejects generalizable rules of distributive justice and judicial decision-making in favor of a radical particularism that permits only ad hoc judgments of unique situations: “What if we jettison uniformity and attempt to adjudicate cases on the basis of the standards appropriate to each political case.”55 She claims that her perspective is akin to that of Martha Minow, but Hekman ignores Minow’s self-proclaimed effort to aid the law in “recognizing difference” through modes of just decision-making that interpret the general moral principles of “rights” to the particular needs of contextualized human relationships (be they between school authorities and students, parents and

96 The Future of Democratic Equality children, the dying and the living, etc.).56 Minow contends that the law, courts, and judges need to consider the specific needs of children, pregnant women, and the disabled when adjudicating their “rights” claims. But Minow distances herself from those who defend a radical dichotomy between the general principle of “rights” and their particular, contextual application: “It is only contradictory to defend both rights and relational strategies in a conceptual framework that poses either/or solutions and reads any focus on human interconnection as a retreat from liberalism to feudalism. . . . It is a mistake to infer that relational strategies are inconsistent with rights.”57 The British socialist-feminist Anne Phillips succinctly summarizes how the universal precepts of rights can take into account the distinct needs of particularly situated groups and individuals: “The equality/difference pole can be overcome by realizing that different needs demand different conditions in order to achieve equal consideration and equal ability to flourish.”58 If one is committed to the values of both democracy and difference, then one endeavors to develop social policies that insure that a particular group’s needs are met in ways that respect the equal worth of persons of all citizens. By rejecting efforts to transcend the counter-position of “difference” and “universality,” Hekman unconsciously reinforces simplistic notions of multiculturalism that appear to affirm the right of each group to complete autonomy of moral and cultural judgment. Such a caricature is deployed by the right to argue that multiculturalism rejects the norms of liberal democracy in favor of an incoherent relativism—one that, for example, would subject women to the sexist practices of particular patriarchal cultures. Zillah Eisenstein joins Minow in trying to bring “difference” in as a legitimate aspect of adjudication in a democratic, pluralist democracy. In The Female Body and the Law, Eisenstein holds that “equality must encompass generalization, abstraction, and homogeneity, as well as individuality, specificity, and heterogeneity.”59 Eisenstein’s view consciously parallels Marx’s argument in The Critique of the Gotha Programme. Marx rejected crude conceptions of equality of results and argued in the Critique that in order to achieve equal satisfaction of needs, society must treat individuals in different situations differently. Marx’s particular example is that workers with more dependents must garner more remuneration than those with fewer dependents, if each member of both families is to have equal resources.60 Progressive taxation is another common example of how a just policy may treat individuals with differential needs differently. It requires each taxpayer to make an equitable contribution to the funding of public goods; but as lower income individuals have a higher marginal utility for consumption, it is just for wealthier taxpayers to be taxed at a higher marginal rate. Thus, in order to achieve an equal right to security for a “battered woman,” the state must intervene in previously defined “private” marital relations; and, in order for a democracy to recognize child-rearing as a socially-valued activity, a “pregnant woman” merits paid-leave beyond what male-normed conceptions of “disability” leave would grant. A democratic pluralist would also affirm that in order to achieve gender equality both men and women should be eligible for equal parental and dependent-care leave. (In fact, Sweden offers extra

Can a “Politics of Difference” Achieve Justice? 97 “affirmative” parental leave to male parents, so as to provide incentives for men to take parental leave as much—or more—than women do.) Hekman’s desire to jettison any conception of “uniformity” and “adjudicate cases [solely] on the basis of the standard’s appropriate to each appropriate case” may well yield the “subjective chaos” that she acknowledges as a danger, one which she conveniently never further addresses in her work.61 Hekman—contra Eisenstein and Minow—continually asserts that advocates of “identity politics” must completely abandon any commitment to “universal concepts of citizenship.” She holds that such universal norms inevitably mask the particular conceptions of justice of dominant (white male) groups.62 Hekman, in fact, celebrates Wisconsin v. Yoder as a model jurisprudence, as an “example of a legal perspective that recognizes uniqueness.” Thus, unconsciously, Hekman admits that a pure “politics of identity”—one that rejects “universal” democratic values—in order to be logically consistent, must defend the rights of particular cultures to engage in sexist and anti-democratic practices. But radical democratic pluralist conception of justice must be both relational and universal; it cannot solely be based on an ethics of “difference.” Hence, Minow endorses the generalizable nature of rights, but argues that for rights to be equally fulfilled they must be applied to the relational and contextual specificity of group life (i.e. pregnant women or disabled students need to be treated differently—though not paternalistically—than non-pregnant persons or students-without-disabilities, if the aforementioned individuals are to achieve equal moral respect). In caricaturing radical or liberal democracy as being incapable of fair or non-biased principles of justice, Hekman endorses a particularism that can never achieve common moral agreement across differences. Perhaps in an unconscious admission of the anti-democratic dangers of her radical embrace of identity and difference, in the last page of her book, Hekman endorses a coalition politics that, while allegedly abandoning “universal standards,” endorses the principles of “equality and justice.”63 But by their very nature, the standards of equality and justice are universal concepts! That is, we can only speak of justice for all, not for some. Radical pluralism can only be compatible with democracy if it promotes equality of citizenship, liberty, and opportunity or in Benhabib’s words “egalitarian reciprocity; voluntary selfascription; freedom of exit and association.”64 This critique of Hekman’s work may strike some as a caricature of a “politics of difference.” Some might argue that Hekman herself (or my reading of her) portrays an outlying, overly “particularist” vision of identity politics. But if this representation of identity-based political theory is totally off base, why is it that most American college students (and the mass media) have learned the value of “diversity” absent any consideration of diversity’s relationship to social justice and socio-economic equality. Narrow, popular conceptions of a “politics of identity” can encourage aggrieved groups to ignore building alliances with other disempowered groups in favor of affirming their own particular voice. Such narrow “identity politics” has led some of its practitioners to focus on issues of “representation” and “subjectivity” that are rather detached from the lived day-to-day experience of the groups they allegedly represent. Robin Leidner’s

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study of the National Association of Women’s Studies (NASW) demonstrates how such militant particularism can be the enemy of democratic pluralism. In the 1980s, the NASW created caucuses to promote the valid pluralist aim of strengthening the voice of previously under-recognized or excluded groups. (The caucuses ranged from those representing lesbians to women of color to Africanist women.) But when the NASW as a whole failed to adopt some of the policy proposals of these caucuses, the caucuses in question frequently exited the association (for being allegedly racist, sexist, or homophobic). In Leidner’s ethnographic study, she argues that many members of the caucuses conflated the right to “equal voice” with a right to “equal satisfaction.”65 But if every selfdefined group is guaranteed that the larger democratic body—the supracommunity of particular communities, to wax Rawlsian—will endorse every one of their proposals then the democratic belief in building cross-group majoritarian coalitions is lost, as is the possibility of building a diverse, but democratic organization or society. In a certain sense, the particular groups in the NASW did not recognize the legitimacy of the majority—and the equal moral worth—of their fellow association members. Thus the National Association of Women’s Studies found itself ripped apart and eventually dismantled. When groups have been systematically denied voice (as one can argue women of color, lesbians, and working-class women had been within the early stages of second-wave feminism by predominantly white middle class and straight feminist organizations), then affirmative efforts to achieve a full voice for the previously excluded are necessary for constructing a truly pluralist, democratic association. But if there are no bonds of trust across difference, then the diverse, larger association constituted by such groups will not survive. To equate affirmative efforts at representation for the previously excluded with a grant of veto power over the larger association’s decisions to any and all particular groups is to deny the value of equal voice and to “essentialize” groups as homogenous in their members’ opinions. It also devalues the crucial democratic practice of building cross-group coalitions on particular policy issues. Rampant pluralism, absent a commitment to democratic procedures and respect across difference, cannot sustain a pluralist democracy. Thus, from Rousseau onwards, democratic theorists have recognized that for a democracy to achieve legitimacy, particular individuals and groups that find themselves in the minority on specific policy questions must recognize the legitimacy of the majority decision—while also maintaining the right to fight again to become a majority. Of course, if the group feels their voice is never heard and that they are always in the minority, then they are likely to exit. But, as Robert Dahl long ago, pointed out, there are no procedural solutions when a democracy unjustly excludes a minority.

Can a “Politics of Difference” Achieve Justice? 99

Toward a Democratic Pluralist Conception of Justice and Politics: Integrating the Politics of Recognition and Redistribution What would a commitment to overcoming the false dichotomy of pluralist difference and democratic equality mean in regard to political practice? The left in the United States, over the past several decades, has engaged mostly in defensive battles to defend our modest welfare state and the limited gains of the 1960s and 1970s in regard to legal rights for women and persons of color. But if power relations in the United States are to be challenged, the left must develop public support for a more ambitious “redistributive” program that would alter the structure of class, gender, and race relations. Nancy Fraser made this argument over a decade ago in a debate with Iris Marion Young as to whether a politics of “recognition” (the assertion of the need for representation within mainstream institutions of the excluded) can, at times, obfuscate the need for a “redistribution” of economic resources and power.66 Fraser embraces the affirmation of difference as central to sustaining the particular communities that nurture individuals within a pluralist society. But she warns that an inordinate emphasis on the “politics of recognition” can weaken the focus upon the need for equality of resources and power across groups. Absent such a redistribution, Fraser argues, “group difference” will continue to transpire on a terrain of structural inequality. Such an unequal terrain serves to disempower disadvantaged groups while enhancing the power of the dominant. Mainstream societal discussions of “difference” and “identity” rarely analyze the radical policy changes needed to dismantle the power of groups privileged by the structural workings of capitalism, as well as of racial and gender hierarchies. Fraser’s democratic socialist aim is to defend, but also move beyond, the liberal welfare state’s politics of “affirmation” (or “recognition) to a redistributionist politics that would “transform” power relations. “Affirmative reforms” ameliorate, but do not transform, the structural inequalities of class, race, and gender. Fraser contends that only an ambitious program of economic democracy and a growth in the social “fluidity” of race, gender, and sexual identities could democratize power relations. Fraser urges the left to move beyond the liberal “affirmation” of multiculturalism, while acknowledging that such policies have marginally increased social justice by expanding disadvantaged group representation in the university and the professions. But the intellectual left, according to Fraser, has in the past few decades downplayed crucial struggles for workplace and economic democracy, as well as efforts to radically restructure gender and racial power relations. Young asserts that Fraser draws a theoretical distinction between recognition and redistributionist struggles that does not hold true in real world politics, as an individual’s identity and his or her access to material and cultural resources are inextricably intertwined.67 While race, class, and gender oppression undoubtedly interact in structuring subordination, Young’s retort may downplay how mainstream liberal (and, at times, race or gender “essentialist”) politics may displace or exclude class and redistributionist concerns. Young may not see this danger

100 The Future of Democratic Equality because she identifies with the left-wing of identity-based social movements. But mainstream American liberalism offers no systematic critique of class inequality, but does reject racial and gender discrimination on the basis of “ascribed” characteristics. Such analysis fits within the “anti-discriminatory” analysis of marketplace, competitive individualism. But class cannot be reduced to individual ascribed characteristics; its “identity” is embedded in structural power relations. The affirmative action controversy illuminates Fraser’s argument as to the price the left pays by ignoring the “redistributionist” aspects of struggles that are popularly perceived as solely “recognitionist.” The affirmative action debate has for several decades now inordinately focused upon the (understandable) need for greater representation of people of color and women in the academy and professions. Due to the lack of a “redistributive consciousness,” most affirmative action defenders have failed to admit that affirmative action is only one necessary, but insufficient tool, for a just redistribution of opportunity across race, gender, and class lines. A greater attentiveness to the interaction between racism and class structure would actually enhance the defense of affirmative action. For example, affirmative action defenders rarely point to the crucial role affirmative played in the transforming of the working class. The inordinate focus of the debate on admissions to elite schools and entrance into the professions has led many critics of affirmative action to contend, incorrectly, that affirmative action has only benefited minorities who already possessed high cultural, economic, and/or educational capital. (In fact, the African-American sociologist and social democrat William Julius Wilson makes this argument.68) This analysis—which has taken on widespread currency—ignores the reality that affirmative action, particularly in its initial years, played a crucial role not only in creating (and maintaining) a more gender and racially integrated middle class, but also in integrating previous white working-class monopolies in the construction industry, skilled-trades, uniformed services, and pink-collar work. Fraser aims to democratically “transform” power relations in the political economy and loosen (or, in her words, “deconstruct”) existing ethnic, racial, and sexual identities. But she would probably not be overly sanguine about the immediate prospects for significant “redistributionist” reforms (absent a strengthening of the labor movement and the reconstruction of a socialdemocratic oriented “rainbow coalition” inside and outside the Democratic Party). Fraser implies that a “good society” would transcend—and render completely fluid—existing group identities.69 Some historical and normative reservations might be made to this assertion. In the short-term American politics cannot “deconstruct”—nor should it—the specific historic experience that produces a common sense of identity among, for example, African-Americans. Obviously, Asian and Latino identities are more nationally-specific, but the common experiences of these immigrant communities in regard to imperial conquest, sweated labor, Eurocentric cultural dominance, linguistic discrimination, and overt discrimination have “constructed” new forms of trans-national political and cultural commonality among many Asian-Americans and Latinos. Would a just, pluralist society erode and “deconstruct” all forms of ethnic,

Can a “Politics of Difference” Achieve Justice? 101 national and racial identities. Obviously, in a society far more just than our own, one would expect “identity” to be irrelevant to whether an individual could fulfill his or her life plan. But would “identity” play no role within a truly democratic, pluralist culture? Would a just society worry if descendants of East European Jewish or Asian immigrants remain disproportionately represented among first chair violinists in professional orchestras? Or if particular forms of music were identified with a particular racial or ethic group? Or if many descendants of Dominican immigrants continue to have a passion for baseball? Would a culture in which all groups were randomly distributed among all job categories be an attractive (or real) culture? I doubt it; but I share Fraser’s hope that these ethnic and national identities would be less salient in political terms, as their political import heavily derives from present or past injustices committed by the dominant culture against subordinate groups. For better or worse, the mainstream American left will in the near-future continue to struggle against the right’s attack upon liberal forms of “affirmative” recognition and redistribution. Thus, Anne Phillips is correct to observe that while Fraser’s analytic distinctions are heuristically useful, in the real world of politics the democratic left cannot afford to draw a radical distinction between redistributionist and recognitionist concerns.70 (In Fraser’s defense, she has always emphasized her desire to build a politics of justice that combines recognitionist and redistributionist goals.) The left cannot abjure struggles to defend affirmative action; it must also work to humanize a punitive “welfare reform” system by loosening time limits for TANF recipients and by radically increasing funding for health care, child care, job training and educational funding for “workfare” program participants. Another morally pressing “reformist” project is to redress our insane criminal justice policies, which victimize hundreds of thousands of non-violent drug users by treating them as criminals rather than as citizens in need of rehabilitative treatment (and only one-third of addicts who volunteer for rehabilitative care can receive it, because of inadequate public funding!). In addition, the total abandonment of a rehabilitative approach to imprisonment means many of those serving inordinately long and unjust sentences will be released without skills needed to reintegrate themselves into the labor market. The (often unconscious) tolerance by a political majority in the United States of the incarceration and isolation of well over 10 percent of our population—the inner-city urban poor and also rural white poor—poses the greatest challenge to advocates of a politics of democratic social solidarity. Middle-class suburbanites (increasingly of all races) view inner city residents as uniformly engaged in pathological behavior, despite the daily struggles of most such residents to eek out decent lives—against all odds—for their children and themselves. (While unemployment rates are obviously disproportionately—and unconscionably—high in the inner city, few middle-class Americans realize that a (bare) majority of adults in the inner cities between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five participate in the formal labor market!) The application of universal principles of justice to the contextual needs of particular parties is a challenge endemic to a democratic pluralist adjudication of specific policy and legal dilemmas. In rendering these judgments, democratic

102 The Future of Democratic Equality deliberators try to make decisions that would strike a majority of their fellow citizens as fair. That is, democratic deliberators must supply reasons for their particular, contextualized judgments—and reasoned judgment involves an appeal to generalizability (i.e. the claim that in a similar context a just person would act in the same manner). As with other false antinomies that drive too much of contemporary political theory, the counter-positioning of universality versus particularity violates the actual nature of democratic deliberative practices. To hold that general moral and legal precepts cannot be applied to specific moral and emotional circumstances ignores the process by which democratic citizens make decisions every day as jury members. How to treat equals and unequals, according to their “relevant differences” is inherent to the process of democratic judgment—and what constitutes “relevant differences,” can only be determined through democratic deliberation. Social justice involves the allocation of social roles, goods, and opportunities through the application of general rules to specific cases. The context of the particular case tells us which rules are most relevant and in what ways the rules should be interpreted, bent, or, even reconstituted. As Ronald Dworkin has argued, legal and moral reasoning is akin to a language game in which we learn to use the language—but also continually reform and reconstitute it—by applying and adapting principles learned through prior practice to new, specific, contextualized cases.71 Sound democratic jurors or policy-makers do not render moral judgment by simplistically and mechanistically inputting particular data into a logic machine that applies universal laws to a situation, regardless of specific extenuating or informative circumstances. It is precisely how those generalizable principles are applied in particular cases (and to particular groups) that defines—and refines—our moral judgment. “Rainbow coalition” attempts to form multiracial, cross-class coalitions programmatically have often centered upon demands for the creation of the universal social and economic programs historically associated with social democracy. Given the growing cultural import of insurgent identities, a renewed, majoritarian articulation of “rainbow coalition” politics will be less economistic and more culturally pluralistic than prior incarnations. But unless accompanied by a universal commitment to democratic equality, an uncritical celebration of diversity can be easily domesticated and commodified into an “affirmative” post-melting pot ideology. Corporate America and mainstream public educators widely refer to the United States as a “stew” or “salad” of relatively autonomous and pluralist groups that allegedly have equal opportunity to achieve in the unbiased marketplace. But this “stew” remains a world in which the particular communities are radically unequal in regard to access to resources and power. Only a radical redistribution of power, resources, and opportunity can fulfill the democratic pluralist promise of achieving relative equality within and across groups. Any radical democratic defense of particular identities must also recognize that intolerant versions of nationalist and identity politics threaten pluralist democracy. Once political theorists cross these conceptual and strategic bridges, then we can begin the hard intellectual work of envisioning how to bring together a majoritarian coalition that would fight for social policies that would

Can a “Politics of Difference” Achieve Justice? 103 both preserve particular identities, but also enhance equality across lines of gender, race, sexual orientation, and class. Unlike standard political liberalism, such a radical, democratic pluralist politics would embrace democratic participation as one of the “primary goods” to be maximized—not only in the formal institutions of the state, but also in the workplace and community. A simplistic identity politics that fails to see how class, race, gender, and sexual orientation interact to construct hierarchy will never threaten an undemocratic power structure. Nor will a politics of identity that fails to embrace individual rights be able to critique narrow ethnic, sexist, or racist exclusionary conceptions of community. Thus, a “universalist” radical democratic pluralism may well offer a deeper critique of the inequalities of liberal democratic capitalism than does an antifoundationalist, post-liberal “politics of difference.”

5

The Rise of Global “Casino Capitalism” Short-Term Financial Profit Versus Long-Term Equitable Growth

Introduction: Farewell to the Democratic State? This chapter examines whether the public policy traditionally associated with democratic egalitarian politics remains viable at the level of both the nation-state and regional and international institutions of governance. New orthodoxies, which span the political spectrum, naturalize global economic integration as an inexorable force that render a left politics of social solidarity either undesirable or impossible. As we have seen in prior chapters, some advocates of a “politics of difference” or of “postmodern fragmentation” abjure equality as an homogenizing value. Center-left enthusiasts of corporate globalization, such as Thomas Friedman and Anthony Giddens1 (the main social theorist of the “third way”) celebrate the extension of both industrial and post-industrial production to newly industrializing societies, while admitting that “losers” (largely former industrial workers) in the First World economies need to be supported by a minimal social safety net and job retraining. Yet these analysts ignore how the neo-liberal ideology of deregulation thwarts the capacity of developed democracies to redress social inequality. And while celebrating the rise of the middle class in India and China, Friedman and others often downplay the accentuation of mass rural poverty in areas that are excluded from the modern market economy. In addition, Friedman underestimates the structural inequality produced by the anti-union, “free trade” ideology of globalization, which often leads to the creation of export-oriented industrial production in the developing world that does little to benefit local consumers. More progressive advocates of “global civil society,” such as Carol Gould, Kathryn Sikkink or Benjamin Barber argue that while the capacity of the democratic state to regulate economic and social life has declined, emerging “transnational” social movements in civil society promise to reign in the power of global capital.2 Yet absent the coercive power of the state—or of regional and international regulatory institutions with binding authority over state actions—it is unclear how social movements can compel transnational corporations to act in ways commensurate with democratic aims. The absence of a viable “governing model” within both social democratic and “new social movement” politics since the Keynesian welfare state came under attack in the early 1970s has had serious consequences for egalitarian politics. By

106 The Future of Democratic Equality “governing model,” I refer to those social norms and institutions that enable a political movement to be popularly perceived as embodying its values in governing practices that benefit ordinary people. The “welfare state” or “social market economy” provided such a governing model for the democratic left of the advanced industrial democracies from 1945–1973. This model, however, has since been eviscerated by a neo-liberal “governing model” whose dictums of deregulation, privatization, and “competitiveness” place downward pressure on mass living standards in both developing and economically “advanced” societies. Through the mid-1970s, the left was either identified with authoritarian communist “state planning” (“mis-planning” might be a more accurate term) or with an advanced welfare state and state regulation of the corporate economy. The latter set of social welfare and regulatory policies were widely associated with improving the living standard and social status of white and blue-collar wage earners. Today, the term “the left” is not readily identified with a specific mode of governance. The intellectual left can be loosely divided between those who advocate a “third way” model of global fiscal and economic deregulation, combined with the maintenance of a modest domestic social safety net, and those who are pessimistic about the project of “social democracy in one nation” and thus increasingly place their faith in an emerging, alternative “global civil society” (often identified with the World Social Forum). How such a “global civil society” will take on the power of global capital is a question that is inadequately addressed by global justice advocates. Some analysts, including myself, believe that existing states, particularly those with as much economic and political power and as large a domestic market as the United States (and the major states of the European Union), can still act politically to shape their economic and social fate. In fact, as I demonstrate in the course of this work, domestic politics and policy, more than global economic restructuring, have engendered the inordinate increase in inequality in the United States. In this chapter, I employ the methods of both normative theory and comparative political economy to explore whether or not new forms of domestic, regional, and international solidarity are possible. An internationalist “governing model” that would enhance global labor, living, and human rights standards will necessitate new modes of transnational social movement cooperation, as well as coordinated action by democratic states to reconstruct international economic and regulatory institutions to make them more democratic and accountable to the needs of the vast majority. International solidarity is no longer a utopian vision of the left (frequently abandoned by its rhetorical adherents), but a pragmatic imperative for a politics of democratic community. The bottom-line basic human and labor rights that a global left project would attempt to institutionalize could not be as robust as the rights of citizens in the most advanced democracies. But absent global regulatory institutions that displace current “race-to-the-bottom,” low-cost-driven development strategies with global and national economic strategies that level-up environment, human rights, and economic standards, the security of democratic rights everywhere will be threatened. Global economic regulatory institutions are heavily influenced by the foreign economic policy of the United States and the leading states of the European

The Rise of Global “Casino Capitalism” 107 Union; thus the domestic politics of these states remain crucial to shaping both domestic and global social outcomes. The divergent policies of Western Europe and the United States, in fact, account for much of the striking differences in their comparative levels of social inequality. A reconstructed model of transnational regulation of capital (a new “global Keynesianism”) will involve coordinated action among states to build democratic, regional forms of governance, as well as reconstructed international regulatory regimes. But international regulatory regimes such as a newly-named or democratized IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization (WTO) are not the same as a global state that ensures all of the world’s population share similar socio-economic and political opportunity. A crucial aspect of this “feasible” egalitarian project will be promoting transnational cooperation among social movements. But if such movements are to achieve their aims, they must influence state policies. Thus, they will by necessity need to intervene in politics at the state level. In short, the rigid dichotomy often drawn by theorists of “globalization” between state-centered and civil society models of social change are not only analytically problematic, but also politically untenable.

Global “Casino Capitalism”: The Enron and Sub-Prime Mortgage Crises as Symptoms of Neo-Liberal Deregulation The mainstream media framed the Enron and World Telecom scandals and the subsequent corporate abuses and corruption of the early years of the twenty-first century as a story of political insider trading: Bush’s Texas buddies using political connections to garner (de)regulatory breaks and manipulate energy prices. Political corruption is part of the story, but beneath the ideological cover of “corruption and influence buying” lies a starker, systemic reality: the Enron scandal as an exemplar of an Anglo-American model of “casino capitalism” which emphasizes short-term profit and stock-market values at the expense of long-term economic growth and social equity.3 The conscious policies of state de-regulation, especially of financial institutions, played a major causal role in the internet stock bubble of 2000–2001, the looming pension-funding crisis, and the recent collapse of the sub-prime mortgage industry and the resulting panic in broader financial markets. The corporate media long trumpeted deregulation and social welfare cutbacks as creating a mean and lean twenty-first-century capitalism. Mean and lean in regard to staffing levels, perhaps; but efficient, no. Since the Reagan era, conscious state deregulation of financial and equity markets, as well as corporate “incentivizing” of management behavior through “stock options,” has constructed a “turbo capitalism” in which rising stock market prices has driven out all consideration of long-term institutional health. The age of “the organizational man” and of labor-management cooperation has long ago given way to the ethos of “labor flexibility” and corporate down-sizing.4 The recent corporate scandals and the financial crises of the late 1990s and today are best understood as casestudies in the costs of global neo-liberal deregulation. To comprehend the crisis of corporate governance one must pierce the veil of “free market” ideology to

108 The Future of Democratic Equality witness the workings of a new, state-constructed form of capital accumulation that prioritizes the “health” of equity markets over the working of “productive” capital.5 The ideology of deregulation does not solely demand the absence of state regulation of corporate behavior; it also advocates the down-sizing of the public sector, the privatization of social services, and the implementation of balancebudget austerity—all in the name of securing the health of financial and equity markets. Only the dollar’s (increasingly tenuous) status as the global currency allows the United States to talk balanced-budgets, while continuously running massive budget deficits via tax-giveaways to the rich and deficit-financing of a war sufficiently unpopular to justify tax increases. In a post-New Deal world turned upside down, the Democrats have become the party of balanced-budget austerity, whereas, the Republicans are the party of “military Keynesianism” who stimulate the economy by “tax cuts” for the rich that redistribute purchasing power upwards, in exactly the opposite direction than Keynes envisioned. The dirty secret that advocates of global financial deregulation ignore is that financial deregulation inevitably leads to speculative bubbles and bursts. As Keynes first pointed out seventy years ago, financial markets can never be selfregulating because their behavior is based upon uncertain information about future economic performance. To prevent speculative booms and busts, the democratic state needs to regulate the wild price swings of financial markets caused by, as Keynes put it, speculators devoting their “intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.”6 Speculative bubbles fueled by the internet stock craze, duplicitous corporate accounting, and the rapid run-up in housing prices accelerated the upward redistribution of income over the past fifteen years. The corporate executives cooked the books with the aid of the very accounting firms that were supposed to protect us from charlatan accounting. When these bubbles burst, the Federal Reserve and banking system stepped in to protect the rich and powerful, leaving the pain of the subsequent economic contraction to be largely felt by poor and middle-income Americans. The corporate criminals at Enron received multi-million “golden parachutes,” while the rank-and-file employees lost their pensions. The Enron crisis and the current sub-prime mortgage crisis are paradigmatic examples of the dangers inherent in the triumph of speculative capital over productive investment that transpired under the thirty-year model of the “Washington Consensus,”—the deregulatory model of late global capitalism. When Enron’s bubble burst in 2001, large pension funds, including those of state employees in California and New York, lost billions of dollars. The bursting of the “internet bubble” by the stock market declines of 2000–2001 and the potential for another downturn due to speculative excess occurred in part because of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Glass-Steagall, originally passed in 1938, banned finance banks (which raise capital for corporations) from owning brokerage firms and commercial banks (which lend money to corporate firms). The gutting of Glass-Steagall by the banking reforms of the mid-1980s onwards meant that J.P. Morgan, Citicorp, and Bank of America not only underwrote

The Rise of Global “Casino Capitalism” 109 bonds for Enron, but also traded derivative contracts with the company and bought stock in the firm. These massive conglomerate banks also used their financial analysts and brokerage firms to peddle Enron’s stock to the public and private pension funds they advised. The self-interest these banks had in propping up Enron’s stock not only cost their clients dearly; lured by massive investment banking fees, J.P. Morgan, for example, found itself holding the bag on the $2.6 billion in Enron debt that it had purchased. Such behavior is exactly what Glass-Steagall’s ban on the “one-stop shopping” of joint commercial-finance banks aimed to prevent.7 The abolition of Glass-Steagall further contributed to the 2007 sub-prime mortgage crisis by allowing banks to push their clients to purchase the high-risk mortgage securities that the banks had themselves created and then aggressively marketed (and in another example of “insider-trading” apparently “dumped” when the bankers saw the impending crisis, but while they still aggressively marketed the collateralized loans to innocent external purchasers!). These conglomerate finance-and-commercial banks also likely colluded with the major rating agencies (who are supposed to protect the public) to hide the risk of the “securitized” loans that allegedly “spread” the risk of the sub-prime mortgages. These new forms of computer-generated loans are so complex that Federal Reserve Chairman Benjamin Bernanke recently opined that when it comes to the valuing of the mortgage-backed securities that are at the heart of the sub-prime meltdown, “I’d like to know what those damn things are worth.”8 The Enron debacle and previous and subsequent financial panics not only are case studies in the calamities that befall a political system that is sold to the highest corporate bidder. Getting private money out of politics is only one piece of the reform puzzle. The deeper, radical truth is that Enron and the sub-prime mortgage market collapse epitomizes the dangers of the speculative “free market” mania that derives from deregulation and the fool’s quest for shortterm profit. The sub-prime crisis derives from the creation of two unregulated, speculative financial investment vehicles during the period of financial deregulation. American and European banks during this period created “structured investment vehicles” (or “SIVs”) which functioned as “middlemen” to channel hundreds of billions of dollars from investors around the world to purchase bundles of American debt obligations taken on by homebuyers, credit card users, and corporations. These vehicles heavily invested in the second “innovative” investment vehicle of the deregulatory era, the “real estate investment trusts” (REITs) that bundled “good loans” (standard mortgages, backed by equity investment and careful income and credit checks on the borrowers) with subprime loans. Now that these supposedly “safe,” “diverse” investment vehicles are facing collapse (due to sub-prime mortgage foreclosures), the SIVs are trying to sell them off and major financial institutions are holding off on making further loans to the mortgage market (including the traditional sector). What the Federal Reserve and major global finance banks fear is an oldfashioned “liquidity crunch,” in which lenders fearing default on the part of their borrowers (and potential borrowers) refuse to provide needed credit to even productive investors. The seamy, underside of speculative profit is speculative

110 The Future of Democratic Equality bust, the costs of which fall on small investors, low income sub-prime mortgage holders, and pensioners rather than on corporate executives and financial institutions routinely rescued by government bailouts and “golden parachutes.” The roots of the Enron scandal and the current sub-prime mortgage crisis go back nearly three decades. Prior to 1980, federal law only permitted modest savings and loans banks to lend for (local) home mortgages, which were further regulated by federal ceilings on interest rates. For years, commercial banks campaigned to deregulate interest rates and to enter the home mortgage arena. In return, they proposed that S&Ls be given more liberal accounting rules and be allowed to enter the commercial real estate market. In early 1980, Congress passed a financial deregulation bill that did everything the banks wanted. By 1985, with the collapse of oil prices in the Southwest, thirty to forty billion dollars in S&L commercial real estate loans had already gone bad. Even though regulatory economists at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and maverick Democratic Representative Henry Gonzalez of Texas warned of the dangers ahead, the S&L industry lobbied successfully to prevent an increase in its federal deposit insurance premium to pay off the losses. The first signs of crisis were ignored. By the 1990 recession, S&Ls across the country could not meet their deposit obligations because of massive defaults on speculative real estate loans. The federal deposit insurance funds could not cover them. The result: a two hundred billion dollar bailout of the S&L industry by United States taxpayers.9 This lemon socialism, in which the victims of the risks pick up the tab for the failed risk-takers, prefigured the solution to the Enron collapse. This time, the victims were not the taxpayers as a whole, but those employees whose pensions depended upon their forced holdings of Enron stock. The costs of either writingoff the sub-prime mortgage collapse or of Federal Reserve bail-outs to financial institutions on the verge of failure is likely to be much greater than the real loss to the economy of the savings and loan and Enron debacle. Enron employees learned a painful lesson from the decimation of their private pensions, which were largely invested in Enron stock. Free market ideology claims that risk-takers should receive great rewards if their risks pay off. What gets lost in this argument is the other side of the coin: risk-takers should also pay the costs if their risks fail. Instead, the employees bear the risks, and will continue to do so in the absence of strong social insurance—high-value, definedbenefit pensions and universal health care. But there is indeed a kind of social insurance for corporate disasters. As the managers at the multi-billion dollar hedge-fund Long-Term Capital Investment (LTC) learned in spring 1997 after massive losses in collapsing Asian stock markets, when a major finance firm fails, the federal government will come to the rescue. In LTC’s case, the Federal Reserve arranged for eight billion dollars of emergency bank financing.10 The Clinton administration’s (particularly Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s) neo-liberal faith in financial deregulation facilitated the creation of Enron’s unregulated private derivatives markets. (Derivatives are complex financial instruments that allow economic actors to hedge against extreme movements in prices and interest rates; if unregulated, however, they encourage further speculative behavior.) In 1993, Enron persuaded the Securities and

The Rise of Global “Casino Capitalism” 111 Exchange Commission to grant it an exemption from the Public Utility Holding Company Act, a depression-era law that forbids utilities from investing in unrelated risky businesses. In 1997, the SEC granted Enron a further exemption from the Investment Company Act of 1940, which prevented U.S.-based firms from leaving debt from foreign power plants off their books. This second deregulatory move by the Clinton administration’s SEC allowed Enron to create what turned out to be its Achilles’ heel—the famous offshore “Star Wars” companies (named Chewco, Jedi, Raptor, Braveheart, and so on). These extremely leveraged offshore companies financed risky foreign energy purchases (including the famous Indian power plant that Dick Cheney lobbied for) by huge investor loans, with Enron stock as collateral. When these foreign investments went bad, Enron’s stock became increasingly diluted and its price plunged.11 Reaganomics fooled the American public once. The administration of George Bush Jr. brought us Reaganomics a second time, but this time as perhaps an even greater tragedy. The Republicans secured enough conservative Democratic support in 2001 to enact the tax cuts for upper-income brackets. This loss of tax revenue, along with the cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars, soon turned the budget surpluses of the last Clinton years into serious budget deficits. President Bush even trumpeted the Enron collapse as the healthy “creative destruction” that characterizes capitalist competition. While Bush fiddled with regulatory reform, the administration’s budget replayed Reaganomics’ perverse military Keynesianism—deficit financing of a massive military build-up and upwardly redistributive tax giveaways. The budget battles of the 108th–110th Congress continuously found the Democrats in a defensive fight against the gutting of the democratic public sector and basic income support, including federally-subsidized health care for the children of low-income families. The cable “business” news celebration of the stock market recovery from the bear internet-bubble market of 2001–2003 helped hide from public view the Bush administration replay of supply-side economics, absent the use of the disgraced title. With the increasing privatization of our penal system and of the armed forces (thirty thousand high-paid mercenaries work for the United States government in Iraq!), neo-liberalism threatens to outsource the Weberian core function of the state. No longer is there a state monopoly on the (legitimate) use of force. Nor has the business press noted that, as with the unpopular Vietnam War, a war financed not by tax increases, but by deficit financing, will undoubtedly increase inflationary pressures and further devalue the dollar in years to come. The Enron collapse, the corporate governance and accounting scandals, and sub-prime mortgage market collapse are not footnotes to an otherwise healthy global capitalism. Rather, they are dangerous outcomes of a deregulated financial system that places all the costs of corporate risk-taking on ordinary citizens and allows the speculative risk-takers to get away with—for them—costless failure. The regulatory economic regime established by the New Deal saved American capitalism from the short-sightedness of American capitalists. Only a revitalized transnational labor movement and a social democratic left that restores state

112 The Future of Democratic Equality (and international) regulation of finance capital can restructure a global corporate order that puts short-term profits ahead of long-term economic prudence. Until democratic regulation of capital is restored, there are likely to be more victims of Enron and sub-prime mortgage speculative debacles. Nor will those who rely on the mainstream media to explain the subsequent crises fathom their true cause: neo-liberal deregulation.12 Thus, if we are to move beyond media and administration platitudes about reforms in the accounting industry we must study the “genealogy” of a new form of global capitalism: the neo-liberal model of deregulation promulgated by the “Washington Consensus” of the U.S. Treasury Department, the IMF, and World Bank. For only by re-learning the lessons taught by Lord Keynes in the 1930s can we stem turbo-capitalism’s incentivizing of short-term greed by its obsession with the stock market’s response to quarterly profit reports.13

The Genealogy of “Casino Capitalism”: Understanding Global Neo-Liberalism’s “Social Structure of Accumulation” The “regulatory school” of political economy’s mode of analysis helps us comprehend the historical transformation from welfare state capitalism to neoliberal late capitalism. The “regulatory school” argues that every stage of capitalist development is characterized by a hegemonic “social structure of accumulation”—the economic, moral, and political principles of a viable socioeconomic order. This “social structure of accumulation” consists of a “regime of accumulation,” a particular strategy of economic development, and a “mode of regulation,” the particular set of public policies and moral and ideological norms which enable the “regime of accumulation” to function smoothly.14 In the regulatory school’s analysis, the political impasse facing both the traditional left and right in advanced industrial democracies results from the breakdown of the old “Keynesian/Fordist,” “social structure of accumulation.” This social structure rested upon a high-value-added, standardized (assembly-line) industrial “regime of accumulation” centered in the core Western countries. This Keynesian or “Fordist” productive “social structure of accumulation”15 engendered the economic growth, and resulting tax revenues, necessary to support the normative “mode of regulation” of the welfare state. The welfare state’s gradual expansion of public provision facilitated steady increases in working-class living standards that facilitated the mass consumption of industrial-produced consumer durables. Oligopolistic manufacturing production produced the economic growth that sustained this labor-capital compromise. Furthermore, state-regulated oligopolies in telecommunications, transportation, military production and aerospace, utilities, and the media facilitated unionized levels of pay and benefits to semiskilled and skilled workers. The deregulation and deunionization of these domestic-based, non-industrial sectors began not under Reagan, but under the neo-liberal Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter. (This administration also failed to pass labor law reform that would have thwarted the emerging corporate assault on union rights that began before Reagan came to power and

The Rise of Global “Casino Capitalism” 113 provided government codification for the assault.) This decimation of the regulated sector of the economy contributed as much to the subsequent stagnation in working-class living standards as did the more widely recognized “deindustrialization” that resulted from competition in basic manufacturing from lower-wage newly industrializing nations. This post-war Keynesian “social structure of accumulation” has been supplanted, since around 1973, by a “post-Fordist” global “regime of accumulation,” in which the core capitalist economies now compete in core manufacturing production both against one another and with the newly industrializing societies. While a considerable portion of basic industrial production (such as steel, coal, auto parts, and electronics) has moved to “newly industrializing countries,” the advanced capitalist societies have witnessed massive growth and re-centering of the economy in financial services, information technologies, and the “infotainment” sector (the production of images and mass recreational consumption). In this emerging “post-Fordist” regime of accumulation, stock market equity values play a central role in determining the value of both management incentives and defined-contribution pension schemes. Conservative government policies of economic deregulation and weakening of union power fostered this transformation to an economy that is more segmented and inegalitarian than that of the post-war social contract. Contrary to those who argue that there is nothing “new” about capitalism on the verge of the twenty-first century, the social and political structure of late capitalism is distinct from that of the post-World War II “Fordist” boom.16 The growth of “flexible production” has privileged “knowledge workers,” while simultaneously deskilling and downsizing basic industrial workers. Late capitalism is inexorably producing a “three-speed society” of the privileged 20 percent of professional-managerial strata; the middle-third-to-half of insecure, but modestly well-off (remaining) unionized blue collar industrial workers and whitecollar public sector workers (social workers, teachers, mid-level civil servants, etc.). For these families, two incomes are a necessity for “middle-class” status, with a particular need for one of the income-earners to have a job that includes decent health care insurance. The portion of American society that lies approximately between the fifteenth and thirty-fifth percentile of family income constitute what sociologist Katherine Newman calls the working “near poor,” who earn above the poverty-line, but below the median family income. To get by economically, these families need two full-time income earners, but many of them are either single-parent families or ones in which one or both partners cannot find steady jobs with health insurance coverage and pension benefits (50 percent of American workers have no pension benefits; and of the half that do, only half of those have more than marginal benefits). These families mostly lie between the fifteenth and fortieth percentile of family incomes. This approximate quarter of American society consists predominantly of a “precariot” of low-skilled, casualized, and (often part-time and underemployed) service sector workers or new “sweatshop” workers (disproportionately undocumented immigrants) who work in food processing, meat packing, garment production, and casual construction. Many of these workers

114 The Future of Democratic Equality are vulnerable, undocumented immigrants. Low-wage service sector jobs are still disproportionately held by women and people of color, but now many older, downardly mobile former industrial white male workers can be found working in casual construction or as “Walmart” customer service employees. Finally American capitalism has thrown up a marginalized bottom 15 percent or so of adult households who are either marginally employed in insecure jobs that do not have health care benefits or are on some form of public assistance, or imprisoned. These inner city minorities and isolated rural white poor workers are dependent on the means-tested, punitive state subsidies of workfare and TANF. Nearly 2 percent of employment-aged adults are in the armed forces and another 2 percent are in jail or prison. In the state of Florida over 10 percent of African-American men are disenfranchised because they have served time as adult felons! Thus, the class map of late capitalism is more complex and less open to predominantly class-based political organization than that of industrial “Fordism.”17 While the contours of the post-Fordist “regime of accumulation” are fairly established (in which the financial, telecommunications, personal services, and “infotainment” sectors predominate), there has yet to develop a stable “mode of regulation,” comparable to the Keynesian welfare state of 1945–1973, which stably governs the democratic polities of late capitalism. We live in a period of left-right political stalemate in which right-wing governments frequently fall after experiencing massive budget deficits and popular unease with growing inequality and unemployment. The parties of the left have yet to construct a governing alternative of non-inflationary growth and high-wage full employment that could incorporate the growing marginalized population into the mainstream. At best, recent center-left governments have only moderated the excess of conservative social welfare cuts and deficit financing, without altering the basic terms of the “lean and mean” post-Fordist “social structure of accumulation.” Thus center-left and right wing governments come and go, with electoral results largely depending on whether the incumbent party presided over modest growth in real family incomes or not. No longer can governments effectively regulate the business cycle; rather, their fates are dependent on the ups-and-downs of a relatively unregulated global capitalism. The Thatcher–Reagan “conservative modernization”18 project of deregulation and social welfare cuts, accompanied by deficit-driven, “military Keynesianism,” represented the first effort at a “post-Fordist” political “mode of regulation.” But the Thatcher–Reagan conservative “revolution” ran up against its own fiscal irresponsibility and its failure to deter downward global pressures on living standards. Thus, it was exhausted as a governing, majoritarian political project by the early 1990s, after more than a decade’s dominance of Western politics. Huge deficits prevented further tax-giveaways to the conservative core upper-middleclass base. The return to traditional balanced-budget conservative austerity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, under George Bush Sr. in the United States and John Major in the United Kingdom, failed to re-mobilize the Reagan–Thatcher populist majorities that united the upper- and middle-third economic strata. The majority of both initially embraced “supply-side” tax cutting in the 1980s

The Rise of Global “Casino Capitalism” 115 out of a desire to forestall the decline in living standards of 1970s stagflation. But once the Reagan–Thatcher inegalitarian boomlet ran up against severe fiscal constraints the right no longer had the economic tools to generate strong, if inegalitarian, growth. Nevertheless, the resulting “third way” governments of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair refused to combat popular suspicion of taxation (even in progressive forms) and only stalled further cuts in public provision. Their cautious rule assumed that the right maintained ideological dominance, if not policy coherence. The right’s seemingly discredited, hegemonic governing project of “supplyside” military Keynesianism came back for a second trial under George Bush Jr. But that model’s accentuation of inequality—plus the failed, adventurous foreign policy of the administration—contributed to Republican Congressional defeat in the fall 2006 elections. The end of the housing bubble and the resulting unsettling of credit and financial markets may doom the Republicans to defeat in the 2008 presidential elections. But the right’s ideological dominance has not completely waned and still constrains what center-left political elites believe to be politically feasible in regard to public policy. The right has succeeded in generating swing-voter mistrust of tax increases (even those targeted on the wealthy) and unease about expanding public provision, even in regard to a United States health care system which fails to provide adequate (or any) coverage for over 30 percent of the population. The right cannot touch social welfare programs that benefit the vast majority—such as Medicare and Social Security. But remaining right-wing ideological dominance so far has precluded any major left policy initiatives in regard to progressive tax initiatives, truly universal national health care (that would abolish private health insurance or at least reign in its ability—and incentives—to deny coverage to the needy) or public expenditure on job retraining and badly needed infrastructure renewal. Such ideological barriers contributed to the “divided government” of the Clinton/Gingrich era and the moderate-centrism of Labor Party Prime Minister Tony Blair. The center-left, which in the United States may soon have governing responsibility handed to them by the ineptitude of the second Bush regime, remains in at least as weak an ideological position than the semi-exhausted “conservative modernizing” project. The right’s nostrums of “free market incentives” and the alleged costliness and inefficiencies of public provision continue to hamper the development of a revised form of social democratic governance. One could argue that the high social wage of social democracy could be sustained on a European-wide-scale or in an American economy that still consumes over 85 percent of what it produces. But, across Western Europe, robust social democratic levels of public provision—even in Scandinavia and Germany—have been (modestly) trimmed and the left has had little success in significantly lowering unemployment rates. This failure allowed the right to mobilize antiimmigrant and law-and-order sentiment to defeat Lionel Jospin in the spring 2002 French presidential elections. The French left’s continued inability to advance a convincing plan for economic growth and lower unemployment contributed to Segolene Royale’s failed bid for the presidency in the spring of 2007.

116 The Future of Democratic Equality Similar high unemployment rates cost the German SPD the fall 2006 federal elections. Reviving a high-wage, growing economy that could sustain Northern European levels of public provision (particularly in regard to equitable public pensions) awaits a regional Keynesian strategy of rising productivity and productive investment in infrastructure and green technology and renewable energy resources in both the First and Third Worlds.19 Unless the hyper-mobility of finance capital can be restrained by regional and international regulation, “highroad, high-wage” investment strategies in the advanced democracies will always be threatened by the threat of finance capital flight to lower-wage, lower-taxed economies. Thus, building the transnational social movements and political institutions capable of implementing such a “global Keynesian” “social structure of accumulation” will be a project of an epoch for the left.20

What De-Regulation Wrought: The Near-Collapse of Global Financial Institutions The conscious state deregulation of the “conservative modernization” project that Thatcher and Regan bequeathed to late capitalist polities favored the “sunrise industries” of high technology, while facilitating the accelerated integration of global financial institutions. Those who sing the song of “farewell to the state” ignore the role conscious state policy, on the part of the United States, with the United Kingdom as its junior partner, played in restructuring global capitalism. The United States government, through its influence within the IMF and World Bank, consciously pushed a “Washington consensus” in favor of government policy initiatives (around the globe) in favor of privatization, deregulation, and major cuts in public provision. The resulting hyper-mobility of global finance and “race-to-the-bottom” expansion of transnational industrial production in newly industrializing nations underpinned the 1997 financial crisis in East Asia and the subsequent credit crunch and devaluations in the Latin America of 1998–2001. Such tendencies toward financial speculation and overproduction and under-consumption have not been fully eliminated from the global economy, as witnessed by the long-term major recession in Japan and the economic crises in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil of 1998–2002 that largely wiped out the Latin American middle class.21 The world economy wrote off most of the LDC debt of the 1970s through the decline in mass living standards for the bottom-two-thirds of the Third World. In part, this resulted from the denial of credit, fertilizer, and access to larger markets for most of sub-Saharan African and Latin American subsistence agricultural producers. Further “disaccumulation” has already wiped out much of the middle class in Brazil, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and Russia.22 If the end of the housing bubble and subsequent credit tightening in the United States spreads globally, a second round of deep global recession could occur in the next few years. A “correction” in inflated global stock markets (most are at record priceearning ratios) threatens to yield the rapid deflation that has historically followed the booms of leveraged, debt-driven expansions. Japan has already experienced such wealth-eroding deflationary declines in its housing and financial markets. A

The Rise of Global “Casino Capitalism” 117 downturn in a heavily-indebted United States economy could have a downward global multiplier effect of large proportions, if a declining currency leads to a devaluation of foreign-held United States money instruments and stock investments (over one-third of United States Treasury obligations are held by foreigners). The vulnerability of the global economy to a crisis of confidence in United States financial markets explains the willingness of the Federal Reserve and Bank of England to put up record financial reserves during the stock market crash of 1987 and the Long-Term Capital Investment crisis in the fall of 1997. Similar costly public bail-outs loom on the horizon for the finance banks and hedgefunds that traded in risky consolidated sub-prime loans and REITs. Over the past fifteen years, United States indebted consumption has been the engine driving global economic growth. The United States trade deficit now equals over 6 percent of our GNP, as compared to less than 1 percent during the 1970 balance of trade crisis that led to the first devaluation of the United States dollar. A further indication that not all is well with the United States’ “job generation engine” is that over 25 percent of United States imports come from nations with higher wages and living standards than our own (Japan represents 13 percent of U.S. imports, Germany another 5). Such imports are not in basic manufacturing, but in high-wage, high-skilled sectors such as laser diodes, aerospace parts, robotics, and machine tools. Our massive trade deficit is offset both by foreign purchasing of United States corporate assets (over half of our publishing industry is now owned by German firms) and significant foreign holdings in our stock and money markets. Imports of basic manufactured goods from the developing world now are equal to 6 percent of United States GDP. As long as the central bankers of Eastern Europe, China, and Japan are willing to treat the dollar as the hegemonic global currency we will, so to speak, be able to live beyond our means. But the recent major rise of the Euro against the dollar and the declining real value of oil priced in dollars could lead to a gradual shift in overseas central bank reserve holdings from dollar monetary instruments to European. Furthermore, a major “correction” in the record price-earnings ratios in our equity markets—which may be occurring—could alter this situation, much to the destabilization of the global economy and American living standards.23 Advocates of the “new” economy contend that the flexibility of small-batch and niche production facilitated by computerization will erode the tendency of capital to centralize and concentrate. Such a nimble capitalism will be less subject to sustained economic downturns. But such decentralization and “outsourcing” of production has more often than not been accomplished by globallyintegrated transnational firms whose intra-firm trade now constitutes close to 40 percent of global commerce. (Try to figure out where the parts for a GM, Ford or Chrysler economy car came from—engine from Brazil, transmission from Korea, assembly done in Mexico, etc.). Thus, post-Fordist capitalism remains more concentrated and centralized than its enthusiasts claim. Even President Clinton acknowledged in the midst of the “Asian” crisis that new forms of global regulation of finance capital must be established. Yet the hostility of global elites to even modest regulation of financial capital (such as a Tobin-tax on foreign

118 The Future of Democratic Equality withdrawal of investments in national stock or money markets) has rendered such comments simply rhetorical asides.

Continuities and Transformations in Global Capitalism: Domestic State Policy Still Matters After the death of communism, there still remains a dirty, unspoken word in American political discourse: capitalism. Has “globalization” ushered in a new, hegemonic, era of global capitalist prosperity that transcends the capitalist business cycle and the concomitant need for state regulatory, fiscal, and monetary policy? Does the mobility of global finance capital and its ability to flee national economies whose policies do not accord with its model of development deny democracies the policy tools to protect their populations from the cyclical nature of capitalist market economies? This widely held belief that state policy is increasingly ineffective in an age of globalization is belied by the conscious differences and political conflicts among the major capitalist states over the governance of global economic relations. Doug Henwood and other left analysts point to continuities in capitalism over the decades. Henwood demonstrates that in regard to the percentage of production-as-international-trade, capitalism witnessed an even more rapid growth in “global integration” in the thirty-year period prior to World War I. In that same period, foreign direct investment represented as large a portion of investment by the advanced capitalist countries as it does today.24 And, as with today, the vast majority of such investments were within the advanced industrial nations and not in the colonial world, despite Lenin’s argument that capitalism would export its surplus capital to the colonial world.25 But one crucial contemporary difference, underplayed by those who stress continuities within capitalist development, is that the 20 percent of foreign direct investment that goes to the developing world is no longer predominantly in extractive industries, but in basic manufacturing. This manufacturing investment is heavily concentrated: 80 percent of manufacturing production in the developing world occurs in only ten nations (the East Asian Tigers of South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, plus Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, Thailand, India, and China). Most of the “Third World” is not participating in the industrial development of global capitalism. Unlike the end of the nineteenth century, today manufacturing production outside of Europe, Japan, and the United States competes directly with manufacturing in advanced industrial capitalism. Japan in the past twenty years has consciously invested large pools of manufacturing capital in Southeast Asia so that Japanese transnationals could export electronics and computer goods to the United States without raising the already large trade imbalance between Japan and the U.S.26 Ironically, the deindustrialization in Japan brought about by the offshoring of basic manufacturing has contributed to the decadelong severe recession in Japan. The power of the state—unevenly distributed across the globe and whose policies are contested both within and among polities—played a major causal role in the rise of “deregulated” global capitalism. As Karl Polanyi taught us long-ago,

The Rise of Global “Casino Capitalism” 119 “the market”—global or national—does not fall from the sky as an inexorable, natural development. Rather, it is “embedded” in a nexus of coercive power relations underpinned by private economic and state power.27 Since the Reagan administration and onwards, United States foreign economic policy consciously advocated a deregulated world financial system. Through our leadership in the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization (formerly, the GATT) the United States advocated for greater international access to its information and technology industries, and agricultural products.28 Mimicking the United Kingdom’s late nineteenth-century hypocritical advocacy of “free trade,” (as the British monopolized trade within their colonial preference system), the United States played to its own economic strengths, while continuing to use anti-dumping legislation and agricultural subsidies to protect its own domestic agricultural and basic steel producers. Simply ask any political leader in Malaysia, France, or most of the leaders of the European Union states, whether “the global free market” has transcended the policy tools of the state and they will inform you that “McWorld” is a creation of a United States foreign policy that favors more global financial deregulation than does the policy of other major capitalist nations, except the United Kingdom. Witness the militant United States opposition to the European Union granting preference to union-picked Caribbean and Central American bananas over US-based TNC-picked Chiquita bananas in the U.S.’s WTO dispute-resolution case against Europe—once again, United Fruit screams out from foreign shores for United States imperial aid!29 United States efforts to enhance private proprietary rights for bio-technology and cultural goods have met with considerable resistance (or lax enforcement) by China and France.30 Not all nation-states believe that transnational corporations should abolish domestic traditions that limit foreign access to their retail, financial, and insurance markets. Nor is there a global consensus that financial capital, invested in money and stock markets, should be able to flee national borders at a nano-seconds notice. Numerous governments have been laggard, nay resistant, to carrying out IMF and World Bank structural readjustment plans (even the alleged success stories of Ghana and Brazil frequently stalled their supposed implementation of IMF structural adjustment provisions). Malaysia and China succeeded in avoiding the massive currency devaluations (and consequent drops in standards of livings) of the East Asian fiscal crises through strict currency control regimes.31 And unions in both France, and (less successfully) in Germany, forced center-left governments to trim welfare state benefits less aggressively than the world financial community desired. Recent failures to institutionalize the Multilateral Agreement on Investment and extend the WTO’s rule to biotechnology, insurance, information, and technology industries, in part, resulted from transnationally-coordinated social movement protest. The failure to extend the WTO also occurred because protest shored up resistance by populist governments in both the developing world and Europe to the more laissez-faire Anglo-American conception of the international economic order. But as the United States (and its junior partner, the United Kingdom) have greater control of that scarcest of economic goods—financial and investment

120 The Future of Democratic Equality capital—the most powerful OECD nations have endorsed much (but not all) of the Anglo-American program for deregulation. Those who romanticize the globalization process, such as Thomas Friedman, contend that no one should care if core manufacturing jobs decline in the United States, as high-wage symbolic manipulation, design, and engineering jobs remain here.32 But as Stephen Cohen and John Zysman have long demonstrated, the most advanced financial and information services tend to be centered near leading-edge forms of production and manufacturing. Friedman’s celebratory comments also ignore the twin reality that there are insufficient “symbolic manipulative” professional jobs to supply all college graduates and not everyone can afford college or possess the academic skills necessary for college work. In fact, in the next decades, 65 percent of eighteen to thirty year olds will not graduate from college! Should we consign the bottom 65 percent of our citizenry to constant economic insecurity? And even engineering and computer softwaredesign jobs can be exported to India or even China (both highly educated societies with a surplus of PhDs). Ironically, the United States Congress in spring 2001 loosened immigration restrictions for white-collar employees in these fields. The neo-liberal denigration of public goods means the Federal government and the states are unwilling to fund primary and higher education in math, science, and engineering in order to supply sufficient numbers of home-grown engineers and computer programmers! In a stark manifestation of the “creative destruction” of global capitalism, record increases in industrial productivity in the United States have been accompanied by continued corporate “downsizing,” particularly in the auto industry. Manufacturing production still constitutes over 23 percent of United States GDP, but with only 14 percent of the workforce now in the manufacturing sector (down from over 35 percent in 1970). Transnational corporations assert that competitive pressures demand annual productivity increases of 15 percent in the manufacturing sector. Since 1990 the United States auto industry has closed over seventy production plants with over an eight million car production capacity; yet the American auto industry maintains the ten million-car level of annual production first achieved in 1990, with less than half the work-force as compared to 1990. In 1990 the auto industry employed over eight-hundredthousand assembly line workers. Today the total is below four-hundredthousand, with close to one-quarter of those working for non-unionized foreign “transplants” producing in the United States. In the 1990s, Boeing set records in commercial aircraft sales, while simultaneously laying off 10 percent (fifty thousand) of its manufacturing workers in the Puget Sound area. Boeing’s establishment of co-production facilities in both China and India accompanied record commercial and military aircraft sales to those nations.33 Fordist industrial production can be moved, as is, from the core industrial nations to Mexico, China, or Brazil. Yet this is not because American or West European workers are “unproductive.” For example, American men’s shirtmakers (until the industry virtually disappeared five years ago) used to be the most productive in the world, producing, on average, one shirt every seventeen minutes versus one shirt every thirty-five minutes in Bangladesh (a productivity

The Rise of Global “Casino Capitalism” 121 difference of over 100 percent!). The “problem” for transnational corporate profits is that the American shirt-maker made an allegedly lavish $7 per hour plus minimal benefits, while the Bangladeshi shirt-maker made 11 cents per hour, with no benefits!34 Due to the rapid changes in fashion and the need for on-time, small-batch production women’s garments, even designer jeans, are still produced in the United States—but almost always in sweatshop conditions by vulnerable undocumented workers. Blithe optimists contend that the stark increase in wage inequality can be redressed by an increase in the number of high-value-added jobs in the information, knowledge, and high-tech manufacturing areas. Hence, the mantra during the Clinton administration from Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin and Secretary of Labor Robert Reich of “train them and the good jobs will follow.”35 The reality, however, is that the high-wage jobs, outside of finance, health care, hightechnology, and the legal industry, largely did not come. If subsequent Democratic administrations abandon the Democratic Leadership Counsel’s conservative commitment to balanced-budget fiscal orthodoxy, we might witness productive public investment in mass transit, environmental and energy retrofitting of production, health care, (rebuilding out-of-date) infrastructure, and housing development, which could create a substantial number of “good jobs” for semi-skilled labor. But the power of conservative ideological hegemony cannot be underestimated. Al Gore signaled an end to mainstream Democratic leadership commitment to public investment and deficit spending as an antirecessionary fiscal tool when he committed himself during the 2000 presidential campaign to raising taxes in order to balance the budget—in a recession! Lord Keynes must have been spinning in his grave! No major Democratic presidential candidate in the 2008 primaries has called for large-scale public investment in research and development, infrastructure, and even renewable energy resources. The desire to be deemed “fiscally responsible” by the mass media gatekeepers of “political viability” remains a powerful one among the Democratic frontrunners. Both the real and alleged competitive pressures of corporate globalization, which could be better resisted by transnational controls upon speculative finance capital, are used to oppose public investment, as well as policies to defend highwage industrial jobs in the core capitalist nations.36 Orthodox free trade economists—who dominate the economics profession—counsel that working people of the advanced industrial world have nothing to fear, for labor is just as mobile as capital, and thus, in the long run, global wage rates will equalize and “good jobs” will no longer flee abroad. But, as Keynes said, in the “long run, we are all dead.” More importantly, capital is much more mobile than labor and can seek out cheaper labor across the globe. Individual workers often cannot bare the cost of emigrating and states still raise barriers to immigration, with notable exceptions made for those seeking low-wage service jobs that domestic labor will not take or for higher-wage computer technicians and engineers when and if skilled domestic labor is short. Contemporary American “exceptionalism” consists of our being the nation with the strongest ideological opposition to progressive taxation and provision of public goods. Yet such hostility threatens to erode the other pillar of

122 The Future of Democratic Equality free-market Americanism: the United States as the land of equality of opportunity. We now rank among the lowest OECD nations in regard to intergenerational economic and social mobility. Demographic trends may force a re-examination of our nation’s hostility to high-quality, universal public goods. The aging baby boom generation faces the burden of both paying for college for its “echo boom” children and caring for their aging and infirm parents. Many middle- and working-class heads-of-households in this “sandwich generation” face the financial and time-bind of having to locate decent, affordable child and after-school care; elderly care for their parents; health care for their families; and higher education for their older children. Half of adult employees have no private pension plans and about 50 percent of those who do have very minimal defined-contribution plans. The fastest growing employment sector in the economy is care-giving, yet workers in these fields continue to be notoriously underpaid and under-trained. Yet, faced with this crisis in care-giving—as compared to Northern Europe’s array of publicly-financed child care and affordable higher education—the American mass media persists in praising the “American model” and criticizing the advanced welfare states of Northern Europe as “sclerotic.”

Farewell to the Hegemonic Imperial State? Hardt and Negri’s Postmodern (Stateless) Empire Radical theorists who argue that the “state” has been rendered impotent by globalized capital frequently cite Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire as the definitive defense of their position. Its status as a canonical text for the “postmodern” left necessitates a careful reading by those who believe that the left must still take politics at the level of the state seriously. Hardt and Negri’s Empire presents itself as a revised Capital for a postmodern capitalist world. But unlike Marx’s Capital, Hardt and Negri’s work is almost devoid of empirical analysis of the allegedly new global economy. Rather, the work is aptly self-described as a “philosophical ontology” of an imperial, “postmodern” corporate construction of “biopolitical selves.”37 Negri and Hardt contend that we inhabit a decentered, stateless empire of transnational corporate domination in which the nation-state has been subordinated to a global ideology of peace and conflict-resolution, with the UN and NGOs performing an ideologically justificatory role for United States interventions. These military interventions, according to Hardt and Negri, serve the interests of state-less “empire” more than the real politik of the American state. (This analysis might well strike the neo-conservative ideologues of the current administration—who know not of Hardt and Negri—as a rather mythical construction.) This global imperial order, according to the authors, involves a new universal form of production, in which humanity’s “brains and bodies” are subject to the “society of control” of global corporate “biopower.” “Biopower” produces not just commodities for exchange and use, but the very communicative meanings and affect of our lives. All human life is now “produced” by the imperial economic system. Thus, “subjects” are no longer “produced” by the “social

The Rise of Global “Casino Capitalism” 123 apparatuses” of Foucault’s modern, “disciplinary society.” As there no longer exist specific institutions, with particular norms and practices, in which repression can be resisted.38 Hardt and Negri’s analysis implies as pessimistic a conclusion in regard to the (im)possibility of democratic transformation at the level of the state, as did that earlier totalizing analysis of the welfare/warfare state’s commodification of pleasure, Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man.39 In the late 1960s, Marcuse argued that post-war affluence and consumerism had pacified and incorporated the working class, leaving students and oppressed minorities as the only groups not fully incorporated into the commodified society. Thus, for Marcuse, these groups would replace the proletariat as the agents who resist the dominant system of commodity production. For Hardt and Negri the agent of rebellion is far more universal than Marcuse’s students and minorities. As all humans are constituted by the “globalized machine” of imperial capital, Hardt and Negri contend that any and all localized resistance contributes—behind the conscious backs of those engaged in “local” resistance—to a global, decentered “rhizomatic” overthrow of “informatized” postmodern capitalism. As we are all dispossessed proletarians now—and the state has been displaced by a “spaceless” empire—the communist utopia of producers controlling their own production, absent the regulation of the state, can be achieved by “decentered” resistance.40 When reading Hardt and Negri one wonders whether the predominant pessimism of the left over the past twenty years has been more politically disabling than the amorphous, cock-eyed revolutionary optimism of these postmodern left icons. Negri and Hardt consciously embrace a “telos of democratic social constitution,” centering upon the potential for reappropriation of social control by the alienated producers of not just goods, but also cultural meaning. Change is always possible and democracy is preferable to corporate domination. Hardt and Negri are not cynical believers in the equivalent forms of all social domination. They aptly criticize postmodernists for underestimating how transnational corporate culture can commodify and market cultural “difference” as a late capitalist form of niche marketing and small-batch production. But in abandoning a naïve celebration of difference, Hardt and Negri substitute a new false universal of an undifferentiated empire in which conflicts between national capitals totally disappear and in which “the poor” have no nation—and also no particular history or agency. The poetry of their revolution is not that of self-conscious, flawed, rooted, democratic human beings, but of “rootless,” “cyborg communicators”41 whose revolutionary activity seems to be more in the realm of the “epistemological” and “ontological” “concept” than in the world of politics: The concept of private property itself, understood as the exclusive right to use a good and dispose of all wealth that derives from the possession of it, becomes increasingly nonsensical in this new situation. A new notion of “commons” will have to emerge on this terrain. Deleuze and Guattari claim in “What is Philosophy?” that in the contemporary era, and in the context of communicative and interactive production, the construction of concepts is not only an epistemological operation but equally an ontological project.

124 The Future of Democratic Equality Constructing concepts and what they call “common names” is really an activity that combines the intelligence and the action of the multitude, making them work together. Constructing concepts means making exits in reality a project that is a community. . . . The common is the incarnation, the production, and the liberation of the multitude.42 Empire has the pretense of being a manifesto for a new communist revolt of the “poor” against the global corporate empire. Hardt and Negri never consider the means by which this new poor or “mass”—a global proletariat involved in the production of communicative selves—will gain the capacity to resist corporate ideology and culture. Nor do they query how the “mass” will take on the corporate behometh, as they do not believe organized social movements can develop under these “massified” forms of cultural production/self-constitution, nor do they believe the democratic state can be used to regulate corporate behavior and redistribute income and wealth. In short, when it comes to asking the strategic question of “what is to be done,” they have little to say beyond the “revolt of the masses.” Yet if, according to their analysis, the producers themselves are now “machines” produced by the empire itself, how can these “machinic” humans gain a critical perspective on the machine that produces them?43 Though Hardt and Negri wish to “abandon dialectical thinking in favor of the immanence of domination and rebellion,” their having done so denudes them of any theory of how the structure of late capitalism can produce a self-conscious rebellious agent. One searches in vein within their writings for any detailed analysis of the structure of global capitalism, let alone a nuanced analysis of the complexity of trade union and social movement organizing on this new globalized terrain. The political activism of the social movements resisting global capitalism, while increasingly regionalist and internationalist in its form, still fights primarily to influence the policies of their respective states. Hardt and Negri present a picture of an immanent network of domination that is as hermetically sealed as Marcuse’s “one dimensional societies” rendition of “the highest form of disciplinary government”, the welfare state. Hardt and Negri term the welfare-state a “factory-society” in which humanity is subsumed under the command of capital and state. In today’s global economy, they contend, command by the state has been rendered almost irrelevant (though they recognize the importance of state force, particularly United States force, as a means of enforcing the universal “pacific” norms of empire): First of all, these efforts are in vain because the decline of the nation-state is not simply the result of an ideological position that might be reversed by an act of political will: it is a structural and irreversible process. . . . The declining effectiveness of this structure can be traced clearly through the evolution of a whole series of global juridico-economic bodies, such as GATT, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the IMF. The globalization of production and circulation, supported by this supranational juridical scaffolding supersedes the effective of national juridical structures.44

The Rise of Global “Casino Capitalism” 125 But the military and economic power of the United States and of neo-liberal Anglo-American capitalist ideology remains a specter haunting Hardt and Negri. The United States and United Kingdom have consciously advocated for global deregulation of finance, insurance, and information services because this is the comparative advantage of these early de-industrializers. Germany and Japan have resisted aspects of the Anglo-American project, in part, because both of their economies still rely heavily on advanced manufacturing production. Although these states have somewhat deregulated their financial and stock markets, they each maintain a greater degree of integration between the state, finance, and manufacturing sectors as compared to the Anglo-American form of corporate governance. Thus, the other major capitalist powers do not unambiguously embrace the “Washington Consensus” of global deregulation and balance-the-budget austerity. The French, in particular, wish to preserve national cultural and intellectual property rights. (One could argue that some of Japan’s current economic crisis derives from their deregulating and “Americanizing” their real estate and financial sectors, leading to the American disease of speculative stock and housing market bubbles and busts.) Hardt and Negri seem oblivious to the conflicts between the European Union, Japan, and the United States over issues such as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, agricultural product subsidies, or intellectual property rights. Not only do conflicts still remain among the capitalist imperial powers, but these conflicts provide niches for resistance that less developed countries have, upon occasion, exploited (particularly in regard to intellectual property rights and global pharmaceutical distribution). The growing capacity of the state in the newly industrializing nations of Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Mexico, and Brazil is not negligible. The movement of basic industrial production (such as electronics and auto parts) from the core nations to the semiperiphery has been accelerated by the conscious industrial policy of these states. The structure of global capitalism stacks the deck against democratic forces, but there still are cards to play (particularly in developing states with administrative capacity, activist social movements, and nationally-oriented productive capital). That the politics and political economy of the states of the globe range from that of a Sudan, to Bangaladesh, to Brazil, to South Africa, to France illustrates the paucity of insight that can be derived from Hardt and Negri’s description of a seamless hegemonic global capitalist system of domination. Hardt and Negri never once explain how the new global proletariat can become self-reflectively critical of the “biopower” which produces their very “bio-consciousness.” If there are interstices and contradictions within international, regional, and state (and local) politics which enable the “mass” to gain self-critical capacity, then one would imagine that distinct social movements would develop their own conscious political strategies reflective of their particular location within an unevenly developed global capitalist order. Hardt and Negri’s “revolutionary” demands for a global citizenship and a social wage cannot be achieved without changes in the immigration and social welfare policies of particular nation-states. (And when they do vaguely speak of such programmatic demands their agenda sounds awfully similar to a call for

126 The Future of Democratic Equality internationalist social democracy.) So perhaps “the global poor”—reified by Hardt and Negri into a “multitude” incapable of any conscious political acts other than localized resistance—are capable of demanding changes in both the economic policies of their particular localities and states, as well as in global economic regulatory institutions. The slogan “think globally, act locally” makes intuitive sense not just to cosmopolitan intellectuals, but also to organized workers and peasants across the globe. These movements have advanced proposals for specific state and global regulatory reforms far more sophisticated than the rather mundane calls for global citizenship and social wage advanced by Hardt and Negri. Hardt and Negri allude to working class rebellion in South Korea, Brazil, and South Africa but seem unaware that these movements have been integral in not only trying to influence, but also gaining state power (one wonders what Workers Party activists in Brazil or the ANC and Communist Party trade unionists in South Africa would make of Hardt and Negri). Politics at the level of the national state still exists in the real world, even if it has disappeared in Hardt and Negri’s totalized society of omnipresent domination and localized, “rhizomatic” resistance. Hardt and Negri appear to imply that as with any complex machine, randomly throwing a monkey wrench into an integrated global capitalism will break it down. But, the authors do not outline any means by which (given the paucity of credible thought about how communist societies would be governed) the global proletariat (or “mass”) will overthrow the highly centralized system of global financial and information capital, yet alone how a global communist order would be governed. Perhaps they believe that discussion of how to govern democratically a globalized capitalism is unnecessary because “even a cook can run the state” once class domination is eliminated. But given the legacy of an authoritarian communism that justified its repressive apparatus with the claim that all serious political conflicts must “wither away” after class had been “abolished,” Hardt and Negri’s transcendence of the questions of a transitional strategy for reform (or “revolution”) and of how to govern a future “global communist” society can no longer be simply tossed off as utopian and naïve. The absence of any serious consideration of strategy and post-revolutionary political vision renders Hardt and Negri’s work more the utopian finger-painting of postmodern academic thought than the hard-edged political strategy of organic intellectual activists.

6

Does Globalization Necessitate the Demise of Democratic Egalitarian Politics?

Farewell to the Welfare State? Or a Premature Announcement of Its Demise? Traditional narratives of both the left and right contend that economic globalization has compelled advanced industrial welfare states to deregulate their economies and curtail social benefits and public expenditure. As the story goes, the liberalization of the movement of both goods and capital (particularly financial capital) limits the policy autonomy of welfare states and compels a “race-tothe-bottom” in regard to both social benefits and economic deregulation. In order to be globally competitive and to maintain fiscal balance, advanced welfare states can afford neither high levels of taxation nor generous social benefits. Continuing to do so serves only to engender both capital flight and high levels of long-term unemployment.1 In addition, the rapid movement of global finance capital (over 1.2 trillion dollars a day and annually sixty-two times the value of world trade) and the growing integration of capital and currency markets (culminating in the twelve nation common European Currency) eliminates the ability of states to run budget deficits in periods of economic slack or to utilize monetary policy to keep interest rates low in order to stimulate investment.2 Most nations’ currency rates now float freely; thus deficit-financing to fight recessions (or invest productively in infrastructure) can lead to a counter-productive devaluation of the national currency. Such devaluation drives up both the costs of imports and raises interest rates, thus counter-veiling the anti-recessionary stimulatory effects of deficit financing. If states choose the alternative option of loose monetary policy aimed at lowering interest rates, financial capital will flee to higher interest areas, thus again placing downward pressure on domestic financial markets, raising interest rates, and thus threatening to devalue the currency.3 In addition, many strong welfare states now utilize the common European currency. Membership in the Euro block constrains fiscal and monetary policy through the threat of sanctions if a nation’s budget deficit rises beyond 3 percent of gross domestic product—including possible expulsion from the Euro block. Thus, as the narrative of both conservative economic libertarians and Marxist pessimists goes, the old “social compact” of the autonomous Keynesian welfare state is dead. All national economies now compete in a global marketplace where

128 The Future of Democratic Equality the demands of productivity and efficiency trump high tax-and-spend efforts to sustain greater equality.4 The only problem with the above narrative is that empirical evidence proves otherwise. While global economic integration—particularly in regard to finance capital—undoubtedly constrains the policy choices of advanced welfare states, there remain considerable degrees of freedom for state policy in regard to taxation, social welfare expenditure, and fiscal and monetary policy.5 While the rate of growth of social expenditure (as a percentage of GDP) has slowed over the past twenty-five years in Northern European welfare states, these states still sustain much more robust levels of public provision and social insurance than do the “liberal” welfare states of the United States, Great Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. The work of Duane Swank, Linda Weiss, and John Hobson demonstrates that, contrary to the neo-liberal narrative that globalization has rendered the strong “welfare state” a utopian anachronism, a positive correlation actually exists between fiscal and trade openness and increases in corporate taxation and social spending.6 While nominal corporate tax rates have declined within OECD nations, the range of corporate revenues subjected to taxation has expanded in most European states over the past twenty years (with the notable exceptions of the outlying “neo-liberal” United Kingdom). In addition, indirect tax rates (the “value-added tax”) are much higher in Europe than the United States and serve as a major source of revenue for public expenditure (and as a somewhat hidden cost to consumers, for the VAT is incorporated into overall prices and not added on at final purchase, as with the sales tax in the United States).7 The rate of increase in social spending in the strong welfare states has slowed since the early 1980s, but the percentage of gross domestic product devoted to public goods and transfer payments has remained remarkably stable. And that percentage remains higher in Northern Europe (in the 27 percent range of GDP) than in the liberal market economies of Anglo-America (17 percent) and also higher than the Anglo-American level in the more “Christian Democratic” influenced welfare states of Southern Europe—France and Italy (25 percent).8 Peter Katzenstein’s contention in the early 1980s that the smaller, more globally integrated economies of Scandinavia, Benelux, and Austria consistently sustained greater spending on social protection remains true to this day.9 But few social scientists or social democratic policy-makers would contend that nothing changed in the “social market economies” from the 1980s onwards, as lower rates of growth did lead to modest, but real, curtailments in social welfare expenditure. While the Northern European economies (particularly Germany) continue to sustain higher rates of employment in manufacturing than the liberal market economies (particularly in regard to high-tech engineering goods, such as machine tools, precision instruments, transportation, and printing presses), the shift from manufacturing to more labor-intensive service industries—such as finance, health, entertainment and personal services— lowered the rate of growth in Europe from the 1980s onwards, as it did in the United States. As Paul Piersen argues, this shift, combined with an aging population that contributed to the increase in state expenditure on health care and

Globalization and the Demise of Egalitarian Politics 129 pensions, slowed the rate of growth of social programs in Western European welfare states.10 In addition, in the Christian-influenced welfare states of Germany, Italy, and France, the traditional reliance on a male family-wageearning head-of-household delayed the size and scope of the increase in women’s labor force participation. In contrast, in Scandinavia, high-levels of female work force participation cushioned the fiscal effects that slower productivity growth had on government revenue-intake in the 1980s and 1990s. While female labor market participation has grown significantly in central and southern Europe over the past twenty years, this increase occurred later and from a lower base than in Northern Europe. Female labor-force participation rates (the percentage of women eighteen to sixty-five who work at least twenty hours per week in the formal labor market) remains much higher in Scandinavia today (around 70 percent) than in Germany, France, and Italy (40–50 percent).11 As John and Evelyne Huber Stephens argue, these systemic variables of deindustrialization, slowing of productivity growth, and soaring budget deficits (due to rises in health and pension costs, as well as increased unemployment insurance expenditures) led to widespread, but modest declines in the percentage of gross national product devoted to social expenditure across Europe in the 1980s.12 The decline in the rate of productivity growth, combined with the demographic pressures of aging on social welfare expenditure, occurred in Western Europe alongside the oil price increases of the mid-1970s through the 1980s. In addition, growing competition from Eastern Europe and East Asia in coal, steel, shipbuilding, and electronics led to rising unemployment during the 1980s in all advanced industrial nations. In most Western European states, cuts in welfare state expenditure derived more from the failure of government to increase social expenditure in line with the rate of inflation rather than from absolute cuts in public goods and transfer payments. Far deeper cuts in welfare state expenditure in the 1980s occurred in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, and in Southern Europe (Greece, Spain, Italy, and to a lesser extent France). The Anglo-American and Southern European nations lacked the wellfinanced job retraining and vocational education of Northern Europe, as well as the active labor market and social welfare policies that facilitate high female rates of labor market participation. Thus the decline in growth in the liberal market economies pinched public revenues more seriously than in the Northern European economies. In addition, the continent had no robust equivalent to the Thatcher–Reagan libertarian conservative ideological attack on the public sector. In New Zealand and Australia, neo-liberal ideological trends similar to ThatcherReaganism (within labor, as well as conservative parties) transformed their welfare systems into a more Anglo-American style of means-testing and workfare-related income support.13 The fiscal pressure on welfare state budgets in the 1980s and 1990s led not only to a slowdown in the rate of growth of social programs in Northern Europe, but also to modest declines in the size of the public sector work force. Public sector employment actually continued to rise (admittedly slowly) in Scandinavia from 1980 into the early 1990s because higher rates of labor force participation

130 The Future of Democratic Equality (particularly among women) meant that revenues could sustain a growth in public sector employment, particularly in child care and education—the very public services that help keep more women employed in the private sector. But Sweden experienced a major drop of 15 percent in public sector employment from 1990 to the present (largely in the health sector, in part due to increases in productivity and medical technology, in part due to partial privatization of certain services). Public sector employment and social expenditure growth stalled in the rest of the welfare states of Western Europe; total public expenditure remained constant (at best), with governments gradually increasing the role for personal incomecontributions to public pensions and expanding private options within the public health care sector (such as purchasing private rooms in hospitals). But most declines in public sector employment in the 1990s were modest, ranging from the 3 to 7 percent range within the OECD nations, with cuts in employment arising largely from attrition rather than from actual layoffs. The striking outliers were Sweden’s 15 percent decline (largely due to the high baseline from which it started) and the United Kingdom’s 30 percent decline (largely due to the privatization of coal, transportation, and telecommunication industries under Thatcher).14 The standard claim of the mainstream American press that the United States’ economic growth over the past twenty-five years has been much more robust than Western Europe’s is not supported by the data. While overall economic growth rates remained somewhat higher in the liberal market economies (“LMEs”—the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand) than the social market economies (“SMEs”—Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) from 1990 onwards, if one excludes the outliers of Norway (social market) and Ireland (liberal market), only a slight variation in growth rates exists between the two groups (a fact rarely acknowledged in the United States popular press). Even including Norway (2.5 percent per annum) and Ireland (4.7 percent per annum), the social market economies averaged annual growth in GDP from 1980–2000 of 1.9 percent, while the LMEs averaged 2.3 percent. Jonas Pontusson’s now definitive comparative work examining the comparative economic and social performance of the “liberal market economies” and the “social market economies” somewhat controversially excludes from both his SMEs and LMEs France and Italy. He argues that neither have as “means-tested” and “liberal” a conception of the welfare state as the Anglo-American SMEs nor as strong a labor movement and tradition of state-labor-business “corporatist” governance as the Northern European SMEs. France and Italy only averaged 1.6 percent and 1.8 percent annual growth, respectively, in the period 1980–2000. But these growth rates are not far off from the vaunted United States average growth rate of 2.1 percent—a difference largely constituted by the United States high-tech stock market boom of the late 1990s. While sacrificing little in terms of annual growth rates, the social market economies of Scandinavia and Northern Europe remain far superior to the liberal market economies in regard to economic equality. Their GINI coeffi-

Globalization and the Demise of Egalitarian Politics 131 cients—the technical means of measuring inequality—remain significantly lower than those of the SMEs.15 The difference in social spending as a percentage of gross domestic product between the liberal market and social market economies partly results from the more adverse age profile of the social market economies that yielded greater spending on public pensions. While this correlation between higher growth rates and lower social spending remains quite weak, the social market economies of Nordic and continental Europe radically outperform the liberal market economies of the Anglo-American world in regard to far lower poverty rates, particularly after taxes and government transfer programs. This is particularly true in regard to the percentage of children living in poverty. The LMEs, on average, drop overall poverty rates from around 20 percent in regard to pre-tax and transfer distribution of income down to the mid-teens after taxes, transfers, and government programs (the US moves from 21 percent of individuals being poor before state redistributive measures versus 13 percent after government measures). In contrast, the Nordic countries go from 17.8 percent (pre-tax) to 4.3 percent (post-tax and social programs) and France, Germany, and Italy from the mid-twenties to less than 7.5 percent.16 Tax and transfer policy impact on child poverty rates is even more striking. The Nordic countries in the late 1990s had only 1.8 percent of children living in poverty after taxes and transfers, while the continental SMEs averaged 4.7 percent adults and 5.7 percent children, after taxes and social programs redistribution. The LMEs, in contrast, had 6.8 percent of their populations living in poverty (after taxes and transfers) and 8.1 percent of children (after taxes and children). France’s after-tax-and-transfer poverty rates were 3.4 percent of adults and 2.9 percent of children versus Italy’s poorer 7.3 and 10.5 percent (Italy’s outlying performance is largely due to the poverty of southern Italy and poorer government administration in those areas). In regards to poverty rates after government redistributive efforts, the striking outlier is the United States, with an official overall poverty rate of 11 percent in 2000, but a stubborn child poverty rate of 14 percent (largely due to the concentrated nature of urban poverty and the adverse effects of welfare reform).17 Katherine Newman’s work demonstrates the severe economic difficulties faced by the next 25 percent of American families who earn between twenty and forty thousand annually. They literally are one sickness or layoff away from joining the officially poor.18 Rawlsian criteria of social justice ask if the worst off segments of society accept their social position as fair; according to these criteria, there is no doubt that working class, lower income, and poor families (particularly with children) would deem Western Europe to be more just than the United States (and the United Kingdom). If there are “sick men” of Europe in regard to aggregate economic growth rates over the past twenty years they are to be found in Italy and France. These two nations have experienced both relatively low growth rates and, more seriously, high rates of long-term unemployment in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. France and Italy experienced the same de-industrialization pressures that occurred throughout Western Europe, but their fertility rates dropped off more precipitously than did those of Northern Europe (in part due

132 The Future of Democratic Equality to the rapid secularization of these once predominantly practicing Catholic nations). To handle the rise in industrial unemployment, Southern Europe (and Germany to a lesser extent) encouraged early retirement of industrial male workers. This raised unemployment rates as well as lowering labor force participation rates as compared to Northern Europe. Lower labor force participation rates occurred not only because of higher male unemployment, but also lower rates of female entrance into the workforce, as compared to Northern Europe. This slower growth in overall employment served to lower the amount of tax revenue available to finance rising pension, health, and unemployment expenditures. This decline in revenue, combined with the disproportionate reliance on payroll-taxes to finance health care and pensions in France and Italy, engendered both higher rates of long-term unemployment and slower rates of new job creation. These trends were more severe than even in Germany, because the weaker, decentralized, but also more militant French and Italian trade union movements successfully obstructed state efforts to make it easier for employers to fire permanent workers.19 German productivity and growth rates have only recently risen above the 2 percent per annum average of 1990–2004 (versus the 4–5 percent of the Wirtschaftswunder years of the 1960s and 1970s). But after 1989, the German economy maintained both modest growth and the basic structure of its welfare state, while incorporating an additional 20 percent of its population from an East German polity whose living standards and productivity levels had been half that of West Germany. This is an astounding—yet largely unnoticed— achievement of a mixed market economy. In Germany, unions have long fought for “permanent” long-term employment, but they have been more flexible than French and Italian unions in regard to allowing major employers to shed labor in uncompetitive sectors. This is largely because Germany has far superior job retraining and apprenticeship programs and high levels of income replacement for the unemployed as compared to France and Italy. The relatively stagnant rate of employment growth in France and Italy gave rise to greater problems financing welfare state provision in these nations (and fairly steady annual budget deficits), as well as much more rigid labor markets.20 In the United States, France, and Italy the odds are very likely that a laid-off industrial worker will never recover the lifetime earnings potential he had in that job. Thus, it is not surprising that Italian, French, and United States workers fight to the end to preserve every such job, even if the “bottomline” of global competition may force layoffs and even corporate bankruptcy. The seamier side of these “sticky” labor markets, particularly in France, is the chronic underemployment—or relegation to low-wage service jobs—of both recent immigrants and second-generation French citizens of North African origin. This gives rise to the infamous division between the “included” and “excluded” in these welfare states, with the “excluded” failing to have the history of formal labor force participation that makes one eligible for higher social benefits. Italy and France partly handle the problem of unemployment by subsidizing youth unemployment and encouraging young adults to stay in university and to live at home. Greater labor market participation by youth in productive jobs

Globalization and the Demise of Egalitarian Politics 133 could help boost French and Italian productivity and growth rates; but employers are unlikely to create more of these long-term positions unless the burden of social welfare costs (pensions and health care) are shifted from payroll taxes to income tax and other more progressive sources of revenue. But currently such jobs are in short supply, hence the queuing up by age to garner them. In contrast, the “flex-security” economies of Scandinavia, Austria, and the Netherlands utilize active labor market and job retraining programs, as well as higher levels of education among lower-income workers, to boost overall productivity and lower long-term rates of unemployment. In addition, the much higher adult labor market participation rates of the Nordic countries sustain higher levels of social welfare expenditure and public sector employment than exist in southern Europe. The generous paternity and maternity policies of Northern Europe, plus high-quality universal provision (or subsidy) of child care means female labor participation rates are much higher. Thus 75–80 percent of adults eighteen to sixty-five are in the labor force in Scandinavia versus 60 percent in Italy and France.21 Workers are more willing to give up noncompetitive industrial jobs if they know that job retraining and generous unemployment benefits will not impact their family income negatively. Social welfare cutbacks have been most severe in nations that lacked a corporatist tradition of labor-business-state cooperation and in states where centralized, majority-rule political systems facilitated rapid policy change. The corporatist industrial-labor structures of northern Europe developed in consort with coalition-based parliamentary political systems, in which various minority parties (representing business, labor, agrarian, or religious interests) often had a voice as minority parties in coalition governments. Whereas in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other states which do not have proportional representation or a history of parliamentary coalition governments, governing majorities can implement policies over the objections of minorities. Thus, Thatcher’s England witnessed the most serious forms of privatization, deregulation, and public sector cuts, although even here means-tested programs proved much more vulnerable than universal ones (though a disastrous experiment with privatization of pensions did go through and has been recently reversed).22 Italy, France, and the United States all face a similar “path-dependent” problem in regard to increasing their labor market flexibility. If laying-off experienced workers is a major tool for downsizing uncompetitive firms and these workers are rarely retrained for jobs with comparable wages and benefits, then workers and unions will defend every current job to the bitter end. Thus, labor markets in such countries will be “stickier” than in nations that have greater degrees of “flex-security.” The more flexible labor market practices of countries that industrialized in a corporatist manner (where state, labor, and capital— particularly finance capital—cooperated to build the modern industrial economy) cannot be readily exported to nations that have a more decentralized tradition of state, labor, and business relations. Yet, if the United States provided universal health coverage (and separated health care coverage from one’s employment status), labor markets would be nimbler. And if France and Italy could switch some health care and pension financing from payroll taxes to more

134 The Future of Democratic Equality direct forms of taxation (as well as increase female participation in the labor market) “flex-security” policies could be gradually introduced. As of now, however, the United States avoids French and Italian rates of unemployment by proliferating low-wage service jobs, while all three nations allow (either covertly or overtly) a younger immigrant population to take up those low-wage service jobs that are often below the “reservation” wage (and tolerated working conditions) of native-born or fully-incorporated (i.e. “white”) citizens. That fewer dead-end service sector jobs exist in France and Italy than in the United States partly results from the difficulty of firing workers. If a worker cannot be replaced that worker must be more productive. And more productive service workers both earn more and necessitate the hiring of fewer service workers! The United States may well be a “job-machine”; but the United States also has the distinction of generating more low-wage, dead-end and short-term jobs than any other advanced industrial democracy.

America the Beautiful or America the Inegalitarian Outlier? The crucial difference between the “social market economies” and “liberal market economies” is not so much in their comparative rates of unemployment as in their rates of total employment growth. The liberal market economies of the United States and United Kingdom are “better” at generating new jobs. But many of these jobs are low-wage, low-productivity service sector jobs with no career track for advancement. The workers holding these “hamburger-flipping” jobs (the French call them “McJobs”) have little formal education or job training and their prospects for family-wage long-term employment and upward mobility are dim indeed. The United States also hides its European levels of unemployment by various statistical and sociological means. The United States excludes “discouraged workers” from the ranks of the officially unemployed; “discouraged workers” are able-bodied adults who have not looked for a job in the past six months; this total often amounts to 1–2 percent (depending upon economic conditions) of able-bodied adults between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five. The United States also incarcerates employable adults at a level ten times that of Europe’s (!) (about 1.5 percent of able-bodied adults between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five languish in prisons or jails). Furthermore, the United States utilizes the military as a huge public sector jobs program (another 1.5 percent of the adult employable population is in the armed forces, and our armed forces are seven times the average per capita size of European forces). Eight out of the ten fastest growing jobs in the United States are neither hightech jobs nor well-remunerated jobs in the finance or “infotainment” sector. Rather, they are such low-remunerated, dead-end, service sector tasks as private security guards, corporate building janitors, and hospital attendants.23 In the United States, “divided government” (Democratic Congressional control coinciding with the Reagan and Bush Sr. presidencies) meant that social expenditure cuts focused on means-tested programs rather than on the popular universal programs of Social Security and Medicare. The “revolution” in United States welfare policy came in the “means-tested” AFDC program, both in terms

Globalization and the Demise of Egalitarian Politics 135 of the steady erosion of its real value in the 1970s and 1980s and its conversion to “welfare-to-work” Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) in the “welfare reform” act of 1996. Clinton did aid the working poor by significantly increasing the Earned Income Taxed Credit. But the most punitive states administering TANF have pushed millions of welfare recipients off the roles—and social scientists do not yet have a clear understanding of what has happened to many of these families. Early evidence suggests that the living standards of households headed by former welfare recipients who secured long-term employment have only marginally improved. But in states which do not generously fund day care and after school care programs for the working poor, the chaotic lives of single mother’s trying to juggle work and parenting frequently leads to absenteeism, job loss, and (most significantly) deleterious decreases in the supervision of teenage children after school.24 The largest study of mothers moving from welfare to work by the Manpower Development Research Corporation (MRDC) highlights the adverse effects upon the behavior of unsupervised teenagers whose mothers have entered the workforce full-time.25 And when the next recession throws more single-mothers into unemployment, TANFs five-year lifetime limit on income support will be severely tested. The rate of economic growth of stronger welfare states has been somewhat slower than that of more deregulated liberal market capitalist societies. But at what price? European workers, on average, work 15 percent fewer hours per year than do American workers. In addition, the European Union now recommends a minimum guaranteed four-week vacation as base-line social policy for member states. Today, the average German and French workers already have six weeks off per year (as compared to two weeks vacation for the average American worker). And contrary to the United States mass media’s image of lazy, coddled European workers, German, French, and even Italian hourly labor productivity rates are roughly comparable to those of American workers. This partly results from stronger left parties and unions in continental Europe curtailing the creation of low-wage, low-productivity jobs and also because workers who work less are usually more productive per hour worked. Working-class family income levels in the SMEs are comparable to those in the United States, though admittedly 10–20 percent lower in France and Italy (but, again, in part because the French and Italians work much fewer hours)—but with guaranteed universal health care and child care (though Italian public provision outside of the northern regions is not highly efficient).26 France, Italy, and Germany, undoubtedly, have serious youth unemployment problems (in part because of policies that subsidize younger unemployed workers who usually do not have dependents in favor of protecting the employment of older workers who disproportionately have dependents). These three states must be concerned with increasing their rate of employment growth and also decreasing their high levels of long-term unemployment. These goals could be achieved by gradually easing lifetime job guarantees in return for greater state and firm investment in job retraining and education. But older workers would have to see evidence that the loss of existing jobs would not preclude them from finding comparably productive and well-paying employment. In addition,

136 The Future of Democratic Equality employers would be more willing to add permanent workers if health and pension payments were shifted away from payroll taxes toward income taxes. The high trade exposure of the European economies and the growing shift of manufacturing employment from Western to Eastern Europe will continue to place constraints on the fiscal, monetary, and social welfare policy of the European welfare state. But, the European social welfare, mixed capitalist economy remains alive and well—and generating higher levels of equality and lower levels of poverty than in the United States. Ironically, the United States—a relatively lean and mean welfare state—may well have the greatest degree of autonomy over its fiscal, monetary, and social policy, as compared to other advanced capitalist democracies. Only in the United States could taxation and public provision be significantly expanded without any serious threat of capital flight or currency devaluation. Why? Since the Reagan era, effective tax rates on the upper-middle class (let alone the rich) have come down significantly. The political challenge to reversing them is considerable, as much of the working- and middle-class buys the conservative ideological argument that tax increases on the rich could make the middle class the next target. In addition, the heavy comparative burden of regressive payroll (Social Security and Medicare) and property taxes on working- and middleclass taxpayers renders the American tax structure more regressive than that of other industrial democracies. Thus, the anti-tax sentiment of the working and middle strata of the American electorate is not totally false consciousness. Until the United States tax burden is shifted significantly from regressive payroll and property taxes to progressive income and wealth taxes, populist anti-tax sentiment is likely to persist among citizens of modest means. (This phenomenon is another example of self-reinforcing path-dependent barriers to change). But what cannot be empirically and historically denied is that the United States achieved higher rates of economic growth in the 1950s through mid-1970s when effective rates of taxation on the upper-middle class and wealthy were much higher. In addition, while the United States spends about 25 percent of its GDP on social provision, a third of that is provided through private health care and pension expenditures. Thus, not only is the United States welfare state smaller than its European counterparts, but considerable funds could readily be shifted from private social welfare expenditure (through savings in our redundant and costly private health insurance bureaucracy) to public provision if the United States instituted a national health care system. In addition, our government could maintain a strong defense against any plausible threats to United States security even if we cut our defense budget significantly and transferred revenues to domestic expenditure. Finally, while there is no guarantee that a new “New Deal” would not engender capital flight and a run on the dollar, that scenario is rather unlikely. The United States trade deficit poses more of a threat to the dollar than would an increase in domestic social spending. Improving United States domestic productivity and the output of exportable high-value-added industrial goods—and not just services—is part of the solution to this dilemma. Getting a handle on the trade deficit would also involve improving average

Globalization and the Demise of Egalitarian Politics 137 family living standards so that indebted consumption no longer plays an integral role in sustaining the purchasing power of the average American family. The dollar still serves as the primary international currency and the United States remains the largest venue for both foreign direct and indirect investment (in stocks and bonds). Any large-scale run on foreign-held assets in the United States would hurt the creditors as much as the debtor United States. Furthermore, as long as Europe has higher rates of social provision and effective taxation than the United States, it is unlikely that Chinese and Japanese central bankers would pull their bond holdings from the United States in order to invest in euros. Thus, social democracy in one nation may remain a possibility in the one democratic polity that has eschewed the universal social provision of the social market economies of Europe. Of course, what is possible in the realm of policy may not be achievable in the realm of politics. Will United States policy-makers peer beneath the myth of the free market to discern that while the market plays a necessary role in signaling supply and demand, market outcomes cannot equitably distribute life opportunities? In a globalized economy, Keynes’ warnings of capitalism’s tendencies toward overproduction and under-consumption, and of the threat financial speculation poses to the stability of democratic capitalism, are more relevant than ever. Yet, the United States is governed by an anachronistic and utopian “Smithian” ideology of the (“never existing”) free market. Feasible labor market reforms could significantly and quickly redress inequality in the United States. Raising the minimum wage to its original level of 50 percent of the average wage (to about $10 an hour in 2008 dollars) and reforming labor laws to restore the right to organize should be on the agenda of any future Democratic administration serious about re-dressing inequality. (Ronald Reagan militantly supported the right for workers to organize unions in Poland, while restoring the right of corporations in America to permanently replace striking workers!) Paul Krugman estimates that over the past thirty years, 5 percent of workers involved in union organizing drives have been illegally fired by their employers.27 But restoring the counter-veiling strength of unions in the labor market cannot alone redress growing inequality. The post-industrial labor market’s proliferation of service sector jobs means that pre-tax income will likely always be distributed in a somewhat inegalitarian manner. If life opportunities are not to be inequitably determined by one’s location in the labor market, then highquality, universal public goods must be equitably financed and available to all. Only by “de-commodifying” (taking out of the private market) access to decent health care, education, child and elder care, and housing can our society seriously redress the inequality that results from an increasingly “winner take all” post-industrial labor market. Absent such reforms, the middle-third will provide for health care, child care, and education through inadequate, ad hoc, private arrangements which involve considerable sacrifice of time and quality of life. The top 20 percent will continue to privately purchase their way out of public provision, relying on exploiting the low-wage, care-giving, and personal service labor of the bottom-third of American society. This bottom-third is separated by a race, gender, and class apartheid from the life opportunities afforded the rest of

138 The Future of Democratic Equality the citizenry. The bottom-third of American society will remain dependent either upon low-quality means-tested public provision (e.g. Medicaid and TANF) or go without such basic human needs as decent health and child care. Furthermore, the self-reinforcing geographical and economic segregation of American federalism (in particular, local funding of public education) facilitates the creation of exclusive suburbs (via zoning laws, housing costs, and property taxes) that have social democratic levels of public provision rivaling the best of Northern Europe. Legal apartheid may have been abolished over forty years ago, but social and economic apartheid is resurgent. Our public schools are more segregated than ever. Few white Americans would know that over 8 percent of African-American men aged eighteen to thirty reside in prison and that onethird of this age cohort are either incarcerated or living on parole or probation! Well over 5 percent of adult African-Americans are disenfranchised because of their prior felony status. Recent statistical studies demonstrate that such exclusion may well determine the outcome of several closely contested races for the House of Representatives, and upon occasion, the Senate!28 In addition, several million full-time workers who contribute essential labor to the well being of our country (including caring for the children of the affluent) may never be able to gain citizenship.

Is the “Third Way” the Inevitable Direction for the “Left”? Or is the “Third Way” an Example of Anglo-American Exceptionalism? The dominant governing tendency of the mainstream left, however, remains the “globalization with a human face” of Bill Clinton’s and Tony Blair’s “third wayism”—a political and policy approach that falls between the “big government,” high-tax and allegedly anti-entrepreneurial policies of American liberalism and European social democracy and the overly laissez-faire and upwardly redistributive policies of Thatcher and Reagan. “Third way” advocates contend that the left must embrace a vision of society that values “opportunity” and “entrepreneurship.” “Third wayers” further contend that traditional social democratic conceptions of social rights must be linked to an ethic of concomitant obligations—citizens must behave “responsibly” and if able-bodied must work in the formal economy (even if parenting infants on their own). Only by recognizing the role for market incentives, “third way” advocates contend, can the left remain relevant in a rapidly changing, globalized, “knowledge-and-information” economy. The British intellectual guru of the third way, Anthony Giddens, embraces, in theory, a fairly non-controversial structure for a just society: just societies should balance the institutions of state, civil society, and economy in a manner that facilitates an efficient and equitable economy.29 While this basic outline is so trite as to be unobjectionable, “third way’s” obsession with a “flexible, competitive” economy leads to practices—particularly in regard to privatization, budget austerity, and weakening the power of unions—that denude both the state’s and civil society’s ability to regulate corporate capital. In “third way” practice, both the power of the regulatory state and trade

Globalization and the Demise of Egalitarian Politics 139 unions must be curtailed because the “new economy” demands labor flexibility. Unmentioned by “third wayers” is the concomitant growth in low-wage, nonunion service sector jobs. The growth of inequality has been greatest in the two societies governed by quintessential “third way” governments—those of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. While “third way” support for earned income tax credits implicitly admits that low-wage workers need a supplementary social wage, this concern is undercut by “third way” advocacy of greater private provision of basic human needs. Absent the supplement of high-quality public goods to the wageand-tax income of low-wage earners, their families will not have sufficient purchasing power to achieve a decent quality of life. The restructuring (and weakening) of high-level, universal public pensions, in favor of contributory private pensions (a reform often defended by “third wayers”) would further increase social inequality. The disastrous results of British pension privatization is already moving Britain back toward a guaranteed benefit system similar to the United States Social Security system. The remedy to all forms of inequality for “third wayers” is training and education. But there is a severe problem with this “upskilling for all” substitute for traditional Keynesian policies of a “rising tide lifts all boats.” Of course, the moderate Keynesian welfare state left behind a considerable number of “seafarers.” Today the structure of the late capitalist economy guarantees that many jobs will be low-wage and dead-end. Yes, jobs in the service sector can be upskilled—for example, by training hospital orderlies to also perform social work or physical therapy tasks. But upskilling also means higher productivity and fewer individuals necessary to do these jobs. Thus, absent a shortening of the work-week and the length of the working-life, increasing labor productivity will not necessarily benefit the underemployed, unemployed, or those whose jobs do not match their level of educational attainment. Already there are insufficient high-skilled jobs to go around for the 30 percent of Americans who now receive B.A.s. Higher education in the United States today is more a certification program for class stratification than it is a preparation for specific jobs, many of which can be done by individuals trained on the job (witness Germany using vocational training to fill many jobs that in the U.S. allegedly “require” a college education). There are also probably limits to how much upkilling can be done to jobs in hotel, food, and personal service industries. Thus in order to avoid the creation of a new, mass “precariot” of low-wage workers servicing the more privileged, the social wage (of public goods and social insurance) must be expanded, not contracted. Social democratic and “third way” faith in education as a means of social mobility ignores the stratified nature of educational opportunities, with outcomes primarily determined by the class and educational capital of a student’s parents. As Rawls contends, if there is to be anything approximating equality of opportunity among students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, extra resources must be devoted to the children of educationally disadvantaged parents. Even so, devoting the best teachers and more resources per capita to the least advantaged students may not overcome inherent tendencies for the children of the well-educated to do best in a “meritocratic” school system. So if

140 The Future of Democratic Equality “third wayers” remain committed to the social democratic belief that all families should have a decent quality of life—regardless of their level of educational attainment or position in the labor market—then high quality universal public provision and redistributive tax policies cannot be abandoned as central social democratic policies. Sociologist Michael Young long ago warned that a truly meritocratic rat-race could well produce even more invidious class and strata privileges than those that exist in inegalitarian capitalist society—as “the winners” of a true “meritocracy” could claim they had triumphed in a fair race.30 Thus, even if one embraces the “third way” vision of meritocratic educational competition, decoupling the quality of life for families from the educational and labor market status of parents would be needed to temper the inequalities resulting from meritocratic competition. “Third way” ideological cant about “fiscal responsibility” and balancedbudgets runs counter not only to the counter-cyclical public spending necessary in periods of recession, but also precludes the center-left advocating for necessary, large-scale public investment in infrastructure and job-generating “green technologies.” Al Gore told the editors of Business Week in the fall of the 2000 presidential campaign that in the event of an economic downturn during his administration he would cut spending to make up for lost tax revenues (thus deepening the recession!). Clinton’s acquiescence to “third way” fiscal orthodoxy led him to abandon in early 1993 his presidential campaign pledge to invest forty billion dollars of his first budget in public infrastructure investment. In addition, if Clinton had not been wedded to “balance-the-budget” fiscal orthodoxy, the budget surpluses of his second term might have been invested in productive initiatives in health care, education, and (deteriorating) public infrastructure. The ideological commitment of neo-liberals to balance-the-budget conservatism (the former policy purview of main-street Republicans) also denuded the neoliberal Democratic leadership of a public philosophy by which to oppose the current Bush administration’s massive tax giveaways to the rich. If the budget is always to be balanced (and there is no productive way to invest government surpluses), then why not return “the taxpayers money to the taxpayers”—particularly the rich ones who constitute the investor class! If neo-liberal Democrats are unwilling to defend strong progressive taxation, then what arguments can be made against conservative views that when the budget is in surplus it is just to focus tax cuts on the rich (who pay the most in taxes, after all). To focus the bulk of tax cuts on the middle and working class would, god forbid, redistribute income! The main reason for the relative weakness of “third way” ideology in continental Europe is the resistance of French, German, and Italian workers to lowwage service jobs and deunionization. French unions are relatively weak in formally paid members—under 15 percent—but relatively strong—courtesy of the labor law reforms following the labor unrest of 1968—in percentage of workers covered by union contracts (over 60 percent). While Italian, German, and French labor market policy will likely have to become somewhat more “flexible” to deal with the imperatives of global industrial restructuring, the greater relative commitment to job security and income-security of continental Europe,

Globalization and the Demise of Egalitarian Politics 141 as compared to the Anglo-American societies, means that continental labor markets will never become the American paradise of “employment at will” (where employees can be fired at the whim of the employer). This continental European mistrust of American-style labor market “flexibility” (and no security) explains why the neo-liberal model of a deregulated financial and informationled late capitalist economy is more developed in Britain and the United States than elsewhere in the capitalist world. As with any ideology, for the “third way” to be popularly received, it must bare a kernel of truth, even while masking more profound falsehoods. Unions who fear that displaced members will end up unemployed (or with low-wage, no benefit jobs) may resist changes in job classification and technology aimed at making their industry more “competitive.” Workers vulnerable to “restructuring” understandably fear that increases in “productivity” or cuts in manning requirements will not engender comparable jobs for displaced employees. This does lead, as “third wayers” contend, to more inflexible labor markets and higher rates of unemployment on the continent, as compared to the United States and United Kingdom (but also to fewer low-wage service sector jobs . . . one can’t proliferate McDonald’s if unions refuse to accept McDonald’s wages). But despite union and rank-and-file resistance, the pressures of competition in basic manufacturing from Eastern Europe and the newly industrializing countries have led the leadership of the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democratic Party to succumb to a modest form of “third wayism”—moderate fiscal austerity and trimming of the social wage. The European left has yet to discern how to create a competitive, full employment economy with relatively high wages. Key to doing so may involve a sharing of work through the shortening of the working day and working life-course. But increased productivity and a shorter-work week must be used to increase full-time employment, rather than to increase overtime pay beyond the thirty-five-hour week, as has largely occurred in France. This is because corporations wish to avoid adding new workers who bring with them new, high payroll taxes.31 While much of Scandinavia and Germany has modestly trimmed its high levels of public provision, they have maintained a far more robust public sector and social insurance scheme than those of the United States, the United Kingdom, or even Southern Europe. There remains a strong commitment to job retraining and flex-security within Scandinavian social democracy. From 1999–2006, the Social Democratic Chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schroder emulated Blair and Clinton in his advocacy of American-style financial market deregulation. But the greater strength of the German trade union movement limited the extent to which Schroder could deregulate the economy. Not only does the ideology and public policy of the “third way” remain vague—deregulated capitalism with a minimal social welfare floor—but it has yet to triumph throughout European social democracy. On the other hand, a left program of “no” to all restructuring of the economy will discourage increased French, German, and Italian investment in newly productive sectors. Such investment could expand the number of high-wage, unionized jobs (in, for example, environmental engineering, computer-controlled machine tools, alternative

142 The Future of Democratic Equality energy development, bio-engineering, etc.). Most policy analysts sympathetic to the French and Italian left believe that to increase labor market flexibility, government reforms will need to decrease the reliance on employer payroll taxes to fund health care and public pensions. Greater reliance on income tax and the VAT for benefit funding would eliminate the disincentive German, French, and Italian capital now face in regard to hiring new full-time workers. While the French thirty-five-hour working week has induced a small, but significant drop in the unemployment rate, the unemployment rate did not drop sufficiently fast to enable the French socialists to win either the parliamentary elections of 2004 or the presidential election of 2007. And in Germany, persistent high unemployment doomed the re-election hopes in 2006 of the German SPDled government. Relatively high levels of unemployment and the influx of immigrant labor to take-up low wage jobs (that are beneath the “reserve wage” of most native-born workers) have strengthened the influence of the continental European right. But French and German workers’ unwillingness to embrace a decline in their living standards means that conservative governments will also face difficulties enforcing neo-liberal policies. Thus, when either left or right govern during a period of economic stagnation, an opposition whose policies differ only in degree, not kind, soon replaces the incumbent government. As of this writing in late 2007, the European banking system faces the possibility of a speculative-driven destabilization engendered by unregulated global finance banks purchasing a significant chunk of United States sub-prime mortgages. Perhaps such a threat will remind “modernizing” social democrats of Keynes’ warning about the threat unregulated speculative, finance capital poses to the material well-being of not only the global economy, but also to the globe’s citizens. “Third way” policies in both the United Kingdom and the United States have improved the status of the working poor through more generous tax credits. On the other hand, “third way” policies have been particularly harsh on poor mothers who desire to stay at home with infant children. Giddens’ own welfare reform prescriptions are not highly objectionable: single parents with infants, he contends, may be excused from work requirements and there should be adequate public (round-the-clock) child care financing to enable single low-wage workers with toddlers and above to be responsible parents.32 Such was the initial rhetorical commitment of the Clinton administration; the original workfare programs assumed that universal health care would have already passed and that eighty billion dollars in extra funding would be appropriated for greater child care, job training, and transportation subsidies (rather than the final eight billion dollars in extra funding). But in both the United Kingdom and the United States the reality remains that publicly-financed, round-the-clock child care is woefully under-funded and is not available to a large proportion of the single working parents who desire it (the same is true for after-school care). Again, there is a partial kernel of truth to neo-liberals belief that “welfare as we knew it” needed to be transformed. Given the mass participation of single working- and middle-class women with young children in the paid labor market,

Globalization and the Demise of Egalitarian Politics 143 defending a decent social wage for single mothers who stay at home with their infants may not be a viable political strategy. But the left then needs to be highly vigilant about fighting for humane work requirements—including the right to further one’s education—and well-financed child care. But “third wayers” in both the United Kingdom and the United States long ago abandoned the fight for humane welfare reform. In fact, few mainstream politicians of any stripe in Britain or the United States cite the stark evidence that low-income families (whether participants in the formal labor market or not) still lack adequate preschool and after-school care, as well as sufficient income support to afford decent housing and food and clothing for their children and themselves. While left social democracy may not have a proven economic model for generating full employment and economic growth, few neutral observers would deny that the relatively high labor force participation rates of “third way” Britain and the United States has actually contributed to greater inequality and has not significantly decreased poverty.

Farewell to the Nation-State? Or Toward Regional Economic Coordination by States? The Imperative of a Politics of Global Keynesianism But even in the United States, Keynesianism-in-one-nation may no longer be feasible. Living standards of workers in advanced industrial nations are interdependent with those of workers in newly industrializing nations who have the skills and education to engage not only in the manufacturing, but also in much of the software development formerly centered in the core capitalist nations. The movement of industrial jobs overseas places the costs of adjustment disproportionately upon the displaced and less-skilled workers of the advanced industrial world.33 Thus, the support for narrow protectionist policies on the part of vulnerable workers in the core capitalist nations can only be avoided if these states provide generous trade readjustment assistance and meaningful job training to workers displaced by outsourcing. The political project of levelling-up labor, human rights, and environmental standards across the globe will depend upon the emergence of effective forms of transnational economic regulation. Heretofore, the leading economic states have controlled the structure and purpose of international economic regulatory institutions; witness the crucial founding and sustaining role of the United States in the Bretton Woods Accords and the accompanying regulatory institutions of the IMF and the World Bank. But with greater competition among the major regions of the advanced capitalist world (Europe, the United States, and East Asia), the United States may no longer be willing or able to exercise its role as the hegemon who bears the costs in order to ensure the collective interest of the system. The global economic system may no longer disproportionately benefit the United States. But, systemic transformation of international labor, trade, investment, and monetary regimes will depend upon progressive coalitions in civil society attaining state power in several advanced industrial and newly industrializing regimes. Only then could those states negotiate new international norms and governing institutions that

144 The Future of Democratic Equality would put upward, rather than downward pressure on global labor, environmental and trade standards. In the short run, the health of the international political economy may depend upon a recovery in influence of “productive” capital that has lost out to the demands of “finance capital” in the age of global economic restructuring. Such figures as George Soros (who ironically made his fortune via financial speculation) and Felix Rohatyn realize the dangers competitive deflation pose for sustaining world demand, living standards, and, ultimately, the global system of production.34 Joseph Stiglitz, the former senior economist for the World Bank, and Jeffrey Sachs represent this trend within the academy.35 Stiglitz and Sachs understand the fragility of unregulated global finance. Yet they are viewed as eccentric, if not radical voices, by both the economics profession and the business media. This indicates just how much transnational finance capital has bought into its nearsighted free-market propaganda. Mainstream pundits laud Thomas Friedman’s writings on the wonders of the deregulated global economy for having truly discerned the long-term dynamics of (an ever-expanding) capitalism. Meanwhile, the reasoned critique of global deregulation of a Robert Kuttner is unknown to mainstream editorial page writers. Business Week long maintained Kuttner as one of its rotating economic analysts. Perhaps this indicates that a minority within the corporate establishment is aware of Keynes’ teachings that rapid deflation can visit the global economy if and when finance capital embraces an ethos of pessimism after a period of irrational, speculative exuberance. Such a shift of expectations in Japan in the early 1990s engendered over a decade of near-zero interest rates amidst stagnation in real investment and production. Keynes “liquidity trap” has come to fruition in Japan (a situation where despite near zero interest rates—or “free” money—productive capital will not borrow to invest because they do not believe they can make a profit on new investments.) What if the Federal Reserve lowers federal funds’ rates and banks and other key investors still refuse to invest in the housing sector? This could be happening as I write. The collapse of the housing bubble in Japan in the early 1990s gave rise to fifteen years of record stagnation (with the real value of housing and equity prices coming down over 30 percent in real terms. Longterm bear markets can happen!). Investors who sour on American economic prospects could choose to park their assets in euro or yen-denominated bonds. This crisis of oversupply and inadequate demand in the late 1990s in East Asia led to a near-depression in the region, and the financial fallout spread to Latin America, as well. That crisis illustrated what unregulated markets promote: speculative over-investment (often in unproductive real estate and golf courses) followed by panic deflations and corrupt efforts of patrimonial oligarchs to corner markets. Unregulated markets in post-communist regimes have yielded not smooth, widespread capitalist prosperity (as promised by capitalist ideologues East and West), but the wild, cowboy capitalism of the Russian mafia and the crony capitalism of Chinese Communist party functionaries. Such unbridled capitalist development has had disastrous effects on mass living standards (particularly among pensioners and the rural population) and only the hard hand of the repressive state has kept the lid on simmering popular unrest,

Globalization and the Demise of Egalitarian Politics 145 particularly in China. The United States Treasury department may not yet realize it, but George Soros does: the international community desperately needs orderly international regulation of finance capital to shield national governments from speculative capital’s veto power over domestic policy. Even the originator of the “shock therapy” of rapid privatization and marketization in Poland, Jeffrey Sachs, now defends the successful Malaysian and Chinese use of capital controls in the late 1990s to insulate itself from the East Asian meltdown. Sachs today condemns the IMF’s standard formula for “structural readjustment” (rapid privatization and slash-and-burn cuts in public provision) as a one-sizefits-none recipe for mass deprivation that is usually unaccompanied by any improvement in macroeconomic performance.36 Advocates of a global Keynesian levelling-up of living standards and trade union and human rights should be short-run pessimists. The nominal conventions of progressive global institutions are rarely enforced, such as the ILO’s ban on child labor. In the short run, the realpolitik interests of the advanced industrial democracies and transnational corporations are not consonant with global democratization. The major functioning international institutions (the IMF, the World Bank, WTO) are dominated by the core capitalist nations and mostly promote open access for global corporate investment and trade. Yet these institutions are somewhat sensitive to popular pressures from below and possess a limited degree of autonomy. Domestic politics and social movement pressure can and does affect state and international institution behavior. How else can one explain the recent World Bank’s emphasis on sustainable development and the conflicts among and between the OECD nations and developing countries over liberalizing trade in biotechnology, information and financial services, and cultural forms of production. Such conflicts have prevented a successful next round of WTO negotiations. Regional social and economic institutions demonstrate some promise of countering the “race-to-the-bottom” logic of transnational capital. The regional policies of the European Union did succeed in raising living standards in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and southern Italy. The EU’s social compact, while not legally enforced, at least ideologically endorses a development strategy that levels up the living standards of participating nations.37 One need be less sanguine in regard to efforts to promote labor and human rights standards within NAFTA and the emerging bi-lateral trade agreements between the United States and individual Central and Latin American nations. But the recent election of diverse forms of left governments in Latin America poses some modest hope that regional Latin American institutions could emerge that would emulate the levelling-up economic and social strategies of the European Union. This threat is in part a motivation for the current slew of bi-lateral “free trade agreements” between the United States and (mostly conservative) Central and Latin American governments.38 Undoubtedly, nation-state policy in favor of greater economic democracy has been eviscerated, but by no means eliminated, by the interests of corporate capital. But within the boundaries of both developed and newly industrializing states, sovereign power can (and still does) play a crucial role in advancing labor

146 The Future of Democratic Equality rights, health and safety regulations, and social insurance. Both traditional Marxists and doctrinaire advocates of laissez-faire originally argued during the first half of the twentieth century that the welfare state and labor rights would either never be implemented because of capitalist control of the political system or, if instituted, would destroy the “free market” economy. But state regulation of the economy is here to stay; the question remains what type of state regulation and in whose interest? In regards to issues of the global commons—nuclear war, ozone depletion, law of the sea—international “regimes” have produced policy reforms which benefit the world’s citizenry.39 The challenges to the very future of humanity posed by global warming and nuclear proliferation will only be solved by means of accountable international regulatory regimes that have the support of a broad range of political regimes. The unilateralist foreign policy of the Bush administration is both counter-productive in the short run, but also against any long-run enlightened conception of United States national interests. Just as the policies of nation-states were only transformed by popular pressure from below, so, too, can political mobilization transform national policies in regard to the structure and practices of international institutions. International trade union and human rights cooperation among social movements is only in its nascent stage. But almost every trade union movement around the globe today recognizes the practical imperative of international solidarity (of course, often more in rhetoric than in difficult practice). And a global consciousness around basic human rights has (unevenly) transformed the politics of many authoritarian states—East and West, North and South. But until democratic social movements can directly influence existing states to strengthen equitable international institutions, the promise of “global civil society” will be just that—promise. The World Social Forum has no coercive bureaucracy nor does it have an armed force to enforce its policy goals. The development of minimal international standards in regard to working conditions and human rights will be halting, and less than uniform. Not every reformist regime in the developing world will have the internal resources necessary to achieve living standards comparable to those of Northern European social democracy. Nor will democratic reforms anywhere be imposed from without (though external pressure, if sought and coordinated with domesticallybased social movements can help). Radicals in the First World should not paternalize developing societies; societies in the developing world will have to go through their own internal political transformation if they are to democratize their internal class, gender, racial, and ethnic power relations. Societies that have yet to develop a significant industrial sector and a politicized working class and liberal middle strata may not possess the social forces necessary for democratic re-distributive politics.40 Democratic movements of students, workers, and progressive middle strata have produced broad center-left governments in the newly industrializing societies of Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Taiwan, Uruguay, Indonesia, South Africa, Chile, South Korea and elsewhere. The stated, if not always achieved, aims of these coalition governments are quite similar to those of the 1930s French Popular Front and our own New Deal. The Communist Manifesto’s classic description of the

Globalization and the Demise of Egalitarian Politics 147 movement of the industrial working class to political consciousness rings true when examining the social unionism of newly industrializing countries. So too does the Manifesto’s premature prediction that capitalism would batter down Chinese walls.41 The trade union movements in those countries comprehend that the interests of their members are intricately tied to broader democratization at home and abroad. Certainly one can argue that the governing policies of left governments in Brazil and South Africa have been constrained in their redistributive efforts either by the state’s over-sensitivity (or over-cautiousness) to the need to maintain the confidence of foreign investors and the IMF. But even with the corruption amidst some of the leading strata in both the Brazilian Workers Party and the African National Congress, few would deny that these two governing regimes have brought some modest gains for the poor in Brazil in regard to income support and nutrition and in South African in regard to housing, rural electrification, and expansion of public schooling. The decentralized international movement for global justice is somewhat divided as to where to go in the short term: most international labor federations and mainstream environmental groups favor reforming the WTO so it could enforce international labor and human rights guarantees. But many NGO activists in the developing world believe the WTO must be abolished and new democratic international institutions be built from the ground up. While there is disagreement as to what institutions would best democratize the global economy, there is fairly broad consensus as to immediate, constructive reforms an international democratic movement should demand. They include: 1

2

3

Debt forgiveness for developing nations by both private banks and national and international lending institutions. These economies have frequently been distorted into export-platforms that do not serve the needs of their own population. Rather, such an economic strategy permanently indebts them to the very global finance banks and IMF which encouraged this disastrous economic strategy in the first place. Most of these debts have long been “written off” by the major global finance banks and the United Nations Millennium Project’s goals include raising funds from the advanced industrial nations to retire any obligations that are not written off by financial lenders. Institutionalize as a floor—rather than ceiling—basic human and labor rights and environmental standards in all international trade and investment agreements. Such agreements would have to acknowledge that for some time to come “living wages” and environmental standards in the developing world would not be set at the same level as those in the First World. Democratic internationalists are not against investment of capital in the Third World. But such investments must contribute to the building of an integrated, domestically-oriented economy of the host country that can raise domestic purchasing power and living standards. To facilitate equitable development, new international regulatory institutions should be governed jointly by developing and developed nations. Such institutions should insure equitable terms of trade and affordable trade

148 The Future of Democratic Equality

4

5

6

and investment financing for Third World development. Third World nations can only overcome the disadvantageous terms-of-trade that their surplus rural labor and shortage of capital imposes upon them if trade is “equitable” and external investment aids the development of internal infrastructure and production for domestic, as well as export, needs. Exporting to pay off onerous capital loans not only denies domestic populations needed resources, but also attracts surplus rural labor to urban areas without supplying adequate gainful employment. Abolish transnational corporations’ ability to “patent” indigenous medical practices and the medicinal benefits of developing nations’ bio-species. A just international economic order would allow indigenous peoples and developing nations the ability to benefit from the contributions their own medical practices and local bio-species can make to the world’s peoples (including their own). Transnational pharmaceutical corporations’ patenting such practices only further unfairly extracts resources from the developing world. Create equitable international regulation of global finance capital. Currently, the ability of global finance capital to transfer billions of dollars into and out of national financial markets allows global finance to veto the democratically-determined economic strategy of a sovereign nation. Imposing a global “Tobin tax” on all transfers of liquid capital out of country (stock and bond market investments and short-term bank deposits) would decrease the incentive for short-term capital flight aimed at disrupting the economic initiatives of sovereign developing nations. Curtail the “push” factor behind international migration of labor through global aid and fair trade policies that support the development of laborintensive industry and sustainable local agriculture in the developing world. In addition, the “pull” factor of the proliferation of low-wage, exploited personal service labor in the First World (jobs which “native” citizens often reject) could be curtailed by raising “living wage” standards in the developed world and by state policy permitting the unionization of the care and personal service sector. Higher wages in the service sector would necessitate an increase in the productivity of such jobs and thus decrease the demand for low-wage labor.

The above reforms could all be instituted without a revolutionary abolition of global capitalism. But will global corporate elites be enlightened enough to accede to the demands of an emerging international movement for social justice? Probably not; but under the pressure of domestic social movements, elites have often learned to live with reforms that they once deemed unacceptable. Absent a “Global New Deal,” the severe inequality and crisis of overproduction and underconsumption that curtails the life opportunities of the global majority may soon visit itself upon the working and middle class of the advanced industrial nations. Just as the internationalism of neo-liberal monetarist elites transformed world corporate behavior, so could social democratic governments’ transnational cooperation create such levelling-up policies, particularly if the

Globalization and the Demise of Egalitarian Politics 149 productive sectors of corporate capital come to comprehend the deflationary threats posed by the ideology of “race-to-the-bottom” economic “development.” No doubt the terrain of political conflict remains favorable to corporate capital, as it controls the relatively scarce resource of investment capital. Yet globalization has not transformed a hard-learned truism of capitalist development: capital and financial markets cannot avoid speculative crises and deflation of the real economy absent effective state regulation. The savings and loan crisis of the early 1990s, the Asian financial collapse of the late 1990s, the “high-tech” bubble bursting amidst the Enron crisis and corporate governance scandals of 2001–2002, and the current financial crisis engendered by the “housing bubble” and the sub-prime mortgage market collapse all illustrate the seamy side of deregulated capitalism. The dominance over the past thirty years of the AngloAmerican model of “casino capitalism” that prioritizes short-term profit and stock market performance renders citizens servants of the free market. But societies can only be truly democratic when the market is a servant of the polity rather the polity’s master. Whose interest economic regulation serves—and what social forces influence the states that construct international regulatory institutions—will determine whether economic globalization thwarts or promotes human aspirations. Without the reinvigoration of autonomous movements in civil society, individuals may not develop the social ties necessary for democratic public life. But even if we bowl together, to change life-opportunities our metaphorical “bowling leagues” need to become political and contest for state power.42 Absent changes in state policy that promote living wages and greater public support for care-giving, citizens have little time left for bowling alone or together. In working to transform the nature of international economic institutions, NGOs and grassroots movements in civil society must take on the political task of influencing state policy—and relating to the impure realm of partisan politics. For better or worse, international institutions and regulatory norms result from cooperation—and contestation—among states. The aims of the World Social Forum will not magically move from the minds of grassroots spokespersons (often international jet-setters funded by First World NGOs) to those who set the policies of global regulatory institutions. The world is unlikely to be governed in the near future by either the black helicopters of an independent, bureaucratic world government nor by enlightened NGO officials or benevolent corporate moguls. In short, the struggle for political power within existing states remains as relevant as ever to the project of transforming the international distribution of power and wealth. Increased coordination across borders by social movements and progressively-governed states will be difficult, given the need for nation-states to garner transnational capital whose behavior may be influenced, but not totally controlled, by public policy. But greater political and economic integration that will benefit popular majorities is not impossible. In the twentieth century, the United States moved from a state-based federalism to a national federalism that increased labor rights and improved social welfare. While the development of the European Union has not been of unalloyed benefit to all of the region’s

150 The Future of Democratic Equality population, few would deny that the European project has contributed to democratic social and economic reforms. Regional integration and international cooperation among states whose governments are responsive to democratic social movements may prove less utopian as a political strategy than is vague talk of (often by highly educated cosmopolitan elites from both the developing and developed world) of an emerging “international civil society” that can democratize the planet while abjuring party politics and state power. In light of the increasing interdependence of economic and cultural life, democratic social movements must be internationalist for instrumental, as much as moral, reasons. Contemporary social movements must coordinate their efforts across borders and influence the policies of their respective states in consonant directions. Thus, the particular interests of any one subordinate group remains tied to the fate of the broader demos, but this time on an international scale. While “postmodern” fragmentation may, in part, describe certain forms of cultural resistance to corporate globalization, postmodernism’s hostility to universal (dare we say “global”) forms of identity and solidarity render it politically incapable of responding to the gross inequalities of late, global capitalism. “Particularist” resistance cannot democratize the power of a capitalist system that has transformed the globe in its own image. Power concedes nothing without a demand, but also without democratic social institutions enforcing their will upon its powerful adversary.

7

Racism, Difference, and the Problematic Politics of Social Solidarity

Introduction: The Racial Politics of Contemporary American Conservatism This chapter analyzes how the right in the United States has utilized the politics of race to erode popular support for social rights and public provision. Mainstream social scientists often underestimate the role that “race” plays as a regulatory ideological norm within American political life. Postmodern and cultural studies theorists have been less guilty of this “marginalization” of race, but have subjected race to a “discursive” analysis that overemphasizes the “performative” aspects of racial identity at the expense of comprehending the less malleable— and more material—political, economic, and institutional nature of racial identity. In addition, racial politics in the United States exhibits how dominant groups can manipulate the “politics of difference” to maintain the subordinate position of dis-empowered groups. Beginning with Nixon, Thatcher, and Reagan, the right has engaged in a “social construction” of a “white” (or, in European terms, “English,” “French,” “German,” etc.) identity. The conscious promoters of this “identity” contend that the egalitarian project of the left discriminates against hard-working “whites” in favor of people of color (or immigrants) who do not play by the overarching national community’s rules of the game—the “work ethic.” “Work” is narrowly defined as full-time participation in the formal labor market. While this chapter refers to the role that the politics of race has played both in the decomposition of the New Deal coalition and decline in support for public provision, I will not reconstruct a narrative that should be familiar to most readers.1 But it is worth noting a symbolic moment that epitomizes the conscious conservative effort to hive off a segment of the white working- and lowermiddle class from the traditional Democratic Party coalition. In September 1980, Ronald Reagan kicked off his general election campaign with a speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi that defended the concept of “state’s rights” against an overly intrusive federal government. Defending “state’s rights,” the central philosophical defense for Southern white resistance to national civil rights legislation, would have been symbolic enough of the Republican Party’s effort to become the party of white nationalism. But, more than the content of the speech, the location for the speech is bone-chilling: in the summer of 1964 in Philadelphia,

152 The Future of Democratic Equality Mississippi, southern racists brutally murdered the civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner. That few mainstream political analysts noted this cruel symbolism further illustrates the inadequate attention paid to the racial symbolism of the Reagan revolution—a counterrevolution against the civil rights revolution. The central role of racism and racial politics in American culture poses great challenges for those trying to revive a democratic egalitarian politics. The absence of shared experience across the barriers of race and class has almost eliminated the concept of social solidarity from popular consciousness. Few Americans can identify the third term of the “troika” of demands that defined the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—liberty, equality, and fraternity (or “solidarity,” in gender-neutral terms). Many white Americans hold to the racially constructed perception of inner cities as a homogenous region populated by a drug-infested “underclass” and “babies having babies” (despite the infinitely more complex social map of inner city and minority communities). Such perceptions, combined with the means-tested nature of public health care and child care, has severely weakened popular support for democratic public provision.2 As economic growth stagnated in the 1970s, most Western welfare states (particularly Britain and the United States) witnessed “populist” revolts of a section of middle-income and working-class taxpayers against public provision, with the wrath of these social forces focused upon the marginalized poor, a part of society disproportionately composed of ethnic and racial minorities. But why did most welfare states weather the conservative attack better than the United States?3 The political vulnerability of the American welfare state is largely due to two unique features of American social policy: its lack of universal principles for organizing public social provision and the sharp disjuncture between social and economic policy. This peculiarly American structure arose largely because of the role of racism and racial politics in the construction of the American welfare state. Since the New Deal, American social policy has effectively been divided into two tiers: a top tier of social insurance (old age and disability insurance) for those regularly employed and a bottom level of less generous means-tested public assistance programs (AFDC—now TANF; food stamps; Medicaid) available for those whose participation in the labor force is more sporadic. This division has fallen along lines of race and gender, for the long-term attachment to the labor force that qualifies citizens for upper tier programs has traditionally been the prerogative of white males with an uninterrupted formal job history. Not surprisingly, it was the top-tier universal programs (such as Social Security and Medicare) that proved relatively invulnerable to Reagan’s attack. In recent times, among policy analysts, and activists, there have developed two main theoretical responses to the conservative exploitation of racial division. The first contends that stressing a universal identity as citizens is the best way to combat race-based conservative politics, while the opposite tendency contends that emancipation of communities of color can only come through resurgent national identity and defense of programs, such as affirmative action, which redress both historical and contemporary discriminatory practices. The

Racism, Difference, and Social Solidarity 153 advocates of universalist, social democratic programs, most notably William Julius Wilson and Theda Skocpol, contend that to combat the racially-motivated hostility to the welfare state, new social policy initiatives should be designed to benefit all sectors of the population (while, of course, disproportionately aiding the least advantaged).4 On the other hand, the politics of “benign neglect” of the urban poor has given rise to both constructive and xenophobic forms of nationalism that assert that strategies of self-reliance remain the only emancipatory course for communities of color.5 Even many scholars and activists committed to multi-racial majoritarian politics, such as Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West, contend that, in the short run, means-tested social welfare programs and affirmative action must be defended against conservative and neo-liberal assaults, as large-scale universal social welfare initiatives are unlikely to be passed in the current conservative climate.6 For those who desire to expand universal forms of public provision, the stark reality remains that conservative racial politics stands as a barrier not only to a defense of means-tested programs, but also to any expanded role for public provision—even progressively financed, universal social programs. Many of the white middle and working class view taxation as inherently regressive and perceive any state programs as disproportionately benefiting the “undeserving” of the inner cities. Moderate income voters have never experienced real progressive tax policies and are thus suspicious that “raising taxes” inevitably means raising their taxes and not those of upper-income taxpayers. On the other hand, few progressives would deny that it has proved difficult to sustain majoritarian support for means-tested welfare programs and affirmative action. In the run up to “welfare reform,” the Clinton administration’s claimed that it would cushion the transition from “welfare to work” by means of universal health care and the generous expansion of publicly-financed child care and job training programs for low-wage workers. But a promised eighty billion dollar increase in funding for such programs resulted in only eight billion dollars of extra appropriation (a result that led to the resignation of Clinton welfare policy staffers Mary Jo Bane, Peter Edelman, and David Ellwood). While some former welfare recipients have found decent paying full-time jobs, many others found that the quality of life for themselves and their children deteriorated considerably. A 1999 Center for Budget and Policy Priorities report argued that the bottom fifth of women who had left the welfare rolls had experienced a major decline in the quality of life for their children. And with welfare agencies consciously discouraging individuals from gaining eligibility for TANF, many mothers who are not participating in the formal labor market are no longer receiving public assistance.7 Those analysts who advocate a classic social democratic policy agenda of expanding universal public provision continually point to popular allegiance to the universal social programs of the New Deal, as compared to significant political hostility to the means-tested programs of the Great Society (e.g. the expansion of AFDC coverage and Medicaid).8 But what such analyses often neglect to mention is that the supposed universal social rights of the New Deal and Fair Deal (Social Security, unemployment insurance, the National Labor Relations Act, the GI Bill, and Federal Home Mortgage Loan program) had been racially

154 The Future of Democratic Equality constructed around the continued exclusion and disenfranchisement of nonwhites and, in some ways, working women. The universal social programs touted as permanent, irreversible gains originally excluded agricultural laborers and domestic workers, the majority of the African-American and Latino workforce of the 1930s. President Franklin Roosevelt bowed to the Southern Democratic plantocracy by refusing to support anti-lynching legislation, let alone more ambitious civil rights actions such as integration of the armed forces. And from 1946–1968, the discriminatory lending practices of not only private banks, but also the Federal Home Mortgage Administration created exclusively white middle-class and working-class suburbs. Such white suburban enclaves, in combination with the remaining more economically-vulnerable white ethnic urban neighborhoods, formed the backbone of the northern white backlash of the late 1960s.9 Even the GI Bill provided greater opportunities for the white working class, as compared to African-Americans, given lower Black levels of college preparatory education, the segregated armed forces exclusion of AfricanAmerican combatants from skilled jobs and officer training, and the refusal of segregated public universities to open their doors to qualified black applicants. Progressives who affirm the universal social programs of the New Deal as models of multi-racial, cross-class solidarity too often ignore these programs’ racially-exclusionary origins. Just as white immigrant political incorporation in the early twentieth century occurred simultaneously with the stripping of political rights for African-Americans in the South, the achievement of social rights for the white working class from the mid-1930s through the 1950s co-existed with the denial of such rights to communities of color. The very social programs that promoted the upward mobility of the white working class denied such opportunities to working and poor people of color. As Jill Quadango’s work demonstrates, when the federal government (in the name of the “Great Society”) took minor steps to redress the exclusion of communities of color from the benefits of the New Deal, significant portions of the white working and middle class abandoned their loyalty to the New Deal legacy.10 Policy elites only embraced legal desegregation in the mid-1960s under the pressure of the civil rights movement and urban unrest in the North. In addition, blatant American racism posed a great embarrassment for American foreign policy elites competing against the Soviet Union for “the hearts and minds” of decolonizing peoples of color. Absent the Cold War, the civil rights revolution might never have occurred. In addition, a labor shortage during the unprecedented economic boom of the post-World War II era also led to the abandonment of the “whites-only” immigration policy in 1965. But this limited incorporation of people of color as full members of the polity immediately engendered mass white resistance. Since that brief reform period (essentially 1964–1966), the political realignment of sufficient traditional New Deal Democrats into the Republican “silent majority” laid the groundwork for nearly forty years of conservative ideological dominance (as “Nixon/Wallace Democrats” transformed into “Reagan Democrats”). Even when Democrats controlled the presidency under Carter and Clinton, these administrations refused to engage in any major policy initiatives aimed at redressing racial (and class) inequality.

Racism, Difference, and Social Solidarity 155 Mainstream Democratic politicians and operatives remain hypersensitive to the “anti tax-and-spend” political instincts of white suburban middle- and upper working-class whites. Clinton’s balance-the-budget fiscal policy and his inaugural announcement of the “end of the era of big government” reflects the acceptance by national Democratic party strategists of the dominance of conservative ideology. The traditional social democratic belief that a politics of class solidarity, mobilized behind an expansion of universal social programs, can redress the politics of white realignment remains politically problematic. Racial identity continues to play an integral part in the shaping of class and political identity, including popular attitudes toward an activist state. Once universal social welfare programs are established, they undoubtedly create political loyalty among their constituencies. Thus, it is doubtful that conservatives will succeed in “privatizing” (and gutting) Social Security and Medicare. But conservative opposition to an expansion of public provision depends upon promoting the ideology that the “liberal” welfare state transfers funds from hard working whites to indolent and dependent people of color (and creates public bureaucracies that are wasteful and inefficient). Despite the administrative costs of Medicare being much lower than that of private health insurance programs, conservatives endlessly assert that tremendous “government waste” would accompany any form of government-financed universal health care coverage. The decline in economic and social security that much of the white working and middling strata have experienced due to the global restructuring of capitalism has created a peculiar, white version of DuBois’s “dual consciousness.” DuBois argued that the “soul” of the African-American is torn between an American and African identity. In the contemporary United States, many whites—consciously or subconsciously—exhibit a split consciousness between their rhetorical commitment to a “diverse” conception of citizenship and a “white” identity that is conceived as being synonymous with the “work ethic.” On the other hand, given the state of race relations, politicized members of communities of color are likely to express a culturally specific racial identity, alongside their identity as citizens. But ethnic and racial mobilization among African-American and/or Latino voters invariably engenders conservative political activists’ mobilization of white swing-voters, based upon a reconstructed, “white” racial identity. Beginning in the late 1960s, in reaction to racial backlash and the collapse of white urban liberalism, many activists and intellectuals within communities of color embraced various strategies of self-reliance, internal renewal, and, occasionally, more xenophobic forms of nationalism. And even multi-racial, coalition-oriented African-American and Latino political leaders use assertions of national and racial pride to mobilize disenfranchised communities.11 The mayoral victories of Harold Washington in Chicago in the early 1980s and David Dinkins in New York in 1989 renewed hopes in the possibility of multi-racial coalitional urban politics. But as soon as these administrations began to implement a mild redistribution of public resources (such as trash collection) to historically underserved minority communities, criticism arose not only from white ethnic politicians, but also from the corporate community, the

156 The Future of Democratic Equality mass media, and even white liberal politicians. In another case of the historical amnesia that plagues the American polity, few political commentators noticed that the strategy of using political power to redress an imbalance in city services replicated the practices of insurgent, ethnic immigrant political machines of the early to mid-twentieth century. Thus, activists and theorists must confront the following conundrum: how can a majoritarian coalition for democratic redistribution be constituted, when the political mobilization of communities of color often succeeds in dividing the very social forces that would benefit from such reforms. Popular analysts such as Thomas Frank urge the Democrats to embrace economic populism as the means by which to build class-unity and to transcend racial politics.12 But Frank fails to recognize the “inter-sectional” aspects of white working-class identity. Forty years of Republican political dominance depended upon a conservative “racial populism” that joined a significant minority of white working-class voters to the Republicans traditional small town Protestant and upper-middle-class base. (Some analysts forget that while the Republicans’ racial strategy significantly reduced the size of white working-class majorities for the Democrats, the Democratic vote still had an inverse correlation to white family income.) This crossclass white coalition constituted the basis for the Republican presidential dominance from 1968–2008 (with an interruption only by two white moderate Southern Democrats who won election during serious recessions presided over by an incumbent Republican president up for re-election.) Until white progressive politicians and social movements help a significant sector of white voters to “deconstruct” their conflation of racial identity with their political self-interest, it will be exceedingly difficult to build Frank’s populist majoritarian coalition. Thus, a majoritarian democratic political project cannot end-run racial politics through a program of progressive taxation, defense cuts, and expansion of “universal” public provision. Rather, such a politics of “universality” will have to defeat Republican racial politics before a new majority can be built.

“Whiteness” as the Material Basis for Conservative Hegemony “Whiteness studies” has been a “hot” sub-field within history and cultural studies over the past fifteen years.13 In post-structuralist lingo, “whiteness” is defined as “the negative identity of a negativity.” That is, “whiteness” is defined by what it is not: not being a “person of color”; or not being a member of a subordinated racial or national group within the United States. But this definition by what “it is not” can sometimes be misused to de-historicize the political and material transformation of the identity of “whiteness” over the past forty years. The development of such an identity cannot be understood apart from the postWorld War II acceptance of white ethnic Catholic and Jewish Americans into professional-managerial and suburban culture. No doubt a “WASPocracy” still remains, but it is much less visible and exclusionary. Ironically, Jewish, Irish, and Italo-Americans (to a lesser extent Poles and other Slavs) used urban political machines to gain access to the civil service, teaching, and uniform service jobs as an early form of “affirmative action” into the middle and upper-working class.

Racism, Difference, and Social Solidarity 157 The contemporary ideology of “whiteness” owes much to the politics of racial backlash that began in the 1960s, as well as to the “Southernization” of national politics. Civil rights activists had hoped that the enfranchisement of AfricanAmericans in the South would extend the New Deal coalition to the South. Instead, working-class whites in the South gradually shifted their allegiances, at least at the presidential level, from the Democrats to the Republican Party (in both the North and South). Thus, “whiteness” does not seem to have embodied “nothingness” or “pure negativity”; rather, in the minds of its “bearers,” it connotes the positive virtues of the work ethic and social responsibility. This ideology of “whiteness” depicts people of color as a homogenous, indolent, and dependent social stratum who sponge off of state welfare programs that are paid for by the taxes of the industrious white working and middle class. (But class often cross-cuts racial identity in complex ways; some black and Latino workingclass men and women who are fully employed embrace aspects of this negative ideological depiction of the “underclass.”) But this identity of “whiteness” does not just connote positive, productive virtues. It also reflects a growing (often unconscious) anxiety among whites in regard to the decline of white-skin privilege and to the growing competition from people of color for scarce middle-class and professional jobs. The slowdown in economic growth that began in the early 1970s occurred simultaneous with African-Americans beginning to gain urban political power. Both these factors contributed to white working-class anxieties about the end of a “whitesonly” monopoly in construction, uniform service, and public sector jobs. These sectors had been the very modalities for white ethnic upward mobility from the end of World War I onwards. For an anxious upper-middle class concerned about their children’s ability to reproduce their parental class status, elite university admissions became a growing obsession, just as students of color began to attend these institutions in significant numbers. Thus, whites who had—or aspired to have—high educational capital worried about their ability to make it into (or have their children stay within) Robert Reich’s “symbolic manipulator” class. These aspirants (or their parents) did not turn their venom against the limited number of places in such institutions or toward the other whites who occupy close to 85 percent of these scarce places. Rather, they sometimes obsessed about the 10 to 15 percent or so of places in select undergraduate and professional institutions that go to Blacks and Latinos as the reason why their white children were not admitted. Ironically, Asian-Americans are sometimes criticized for being too “meritocratically” competitive, although their “model minority” status in the eyes of many whites ignores the poverty of many Filipino, Pacific Islander, Southeast Asian, and recent Chinese immigrants. The emergence of “white” political consciousness rested not only on the white backlash against emerging non-white competitors for scarce admission to elite universities and the professions. It also resulted from the beleaguered sensibilities of urban, white working-class enclaves that fought against busing and housing integration from the late 1960s into the 1970s. Political scientists today rarely talk anymore about the politics of busing or neighborhood integration, in

158 The Future of Democratic Equality part because efforts at residential and Northern urban/suburban school integration had largely been defeated by the mid-1970s. The 1968 Fair Housing Act offered no strong enforcement mechanisms, and the Nixon administration’s 1971 abandonment of suburban “open housing” efforts meant residential integration of affluent suburbs has never occurred. The 1973 Supreme Court decision in Ford vs. Miliken forbid court-mandated school busing across metropolitan school district lines. Once court-mandated busing could only transport students of color across their current school district to other underfunded and underserved urban, white working-class schools, busing’s viability as a tool to promote equal access to educational resources came to an end (and such busing met massive white resistance). The transformation of white, ethnic Catholic and Jewish identity from hyphenated, ethnic Americans to generic “whites” not only reflected the postWorld War II decline in anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic sentiment. The transformation of ethnic consciousness into “white” consciousness developed during the 1970s and 1980s as a mode of dealing with two socio-psychic anxieties: fears of downward mobility and fears that insurgent communities of color threatened the unspoken privileges of even the lower white orders. Thus, “whiteness” became a conscious identity among previously semi-subordinate white strata just when their legal white-skin privilege ended and their upward social mobility objectively became more difficult. Growing white fear of militant resistance to racism (and violence) on the part of people of color (particularly young men) partially explains the persistent physical abuse of communities of color by police, and the hyper-surveillance by white store owners and retail clerks of AfricanAmerican consumers (and also by some Asian, Black, and Latino store owners as well). But the growing beleaguered sense of urban white working-class enclaves (often accompanied by suburban flight or exodus of children to Catholic schools) occurred, ironically, just as white marriage across ethnic and religious lines (and upward mobility and suburbanization) contributed to a decline in white ethnic identity. Moynihan and Glazer argued in Beyond the Melting Pot that white ethnics had made social gains not by deracinating themselves into the mainstream but by sticking together through ethnic advancement strategies. Such strategies would today be termed “affirmative action,” the use of state action to redress structural class, ethnic, or racial disadvantage.14 (Only a few years later, Nathan Glazer, in his opposition to affirmative action, would rail against conceptions of “group rights” as antithetical to liberal individualism. In the 1990s, in a New York Times magazine article, Glazer would reverse his opposition to affirmative action for African-Americans, arguing that the legacy of slavery obligated the United States to take positive measures to expand economic opportunity for its black citizens.)15 This strategy of using urban electoral power to leverage new economic opportunities allowed for the post-World War I movement of the Irish from male day-laborers to construction trade and uniform services workers and from female domestic servants to public school teachers. Jewish political influence in major cities also facilitated the entry of the children of garment workers and

Racism, Difference, and Social Solidarity 159 others into the lettered civil service and public school teaching one generation later. And Italo-Americans used political power to leverage jobs within construction trades heavily dependent on public contracts, not to mention gaining city contracts for Italo-American small business and contractors. These earlier forms of “affirmative action” would enable the children of the white immigrant working class to move to the suburbs and contribute to their embracing a new “post-ethnic” identity as upstanding “white” taxpaying citizens. Those left behind in the urban white working class found themselves in the 1960s defending their urban turf no longer from other European immigrant groups (e.g. Jews versus Italians on the Lower East Side and East Harlem and Irish and Jews in the Bronx from the early 1900s down through World War II), but against postWorld War II Latino immigrants and Blacks migrating from the South. “Whiteness” emerged as a conscious form of identity among former “ethnic Americans” once discrimination against ethnic immigrants had subsided after World War II. This occurred at the same time that African-Americans began to mount successful legal, political, and cultural challenges to “white-skin” privilege. In addition, the American racial map grew more complex following the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. Responding to the post-World War II economic boom’s need for both low-wage service sector labor and skilled technical professionals, the federal government abandoned its long-standing policy of “whites only immigration.” The class and national diversity of the post-1965 influx of Latino and Asian immigrants increased “nativist,” white American fears of “life on a colored planet.”16 These fears would be accelerated by the massive increase in undocumented Latino immigration in the 1970s, which accelerated in the mid-1990s onwards after the North American Free Trade Association agreement enabled tariff-free United States agribusiness products to wipe out traditional, small-scale Mexican agriculture. This development contributed to the fourfold increase in the rate of Mexican migration (mostly undocumented) from 1994 to the present day. Today, the 12 percent of United States residents that have been born abroad represents the highest percentage of non-native born residents since right after the massive wave of European immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Today, immigrant citizens, permanent residents, and undocumented workers provide essential labor in day and elder care, health care, food processing, hotels and restaurants, construction and landscaping. A day without immigrant labor would literally shut the country down. Most undocumented workers contribute payroll taxes that shore up Social Security and Medicare funding, even though many of these workers may never be eligible for Social Security and Medicare benefits. Yet the right-wing populist myth is perpetuated daily on the Lou Dobbs show and other mainstream media that undocumented immigrants “cost” the economy heavily in regard to school and medical costs for their children. Absent a deeper understanding of both the “push” and “pull” factors that cause mass migration from the developing world to the developed, no sane policy debate can occur in the United States. Immigration to the United States does not only result from the “pull” of greater economic opportunity. It is also caused by the “push” of growing economic inequality and exploitation in developing societies.

160 The Future of Democratic Equality Much of the mass migration of the past decade from Mexico and Central America is due to NAFTA and other “free trade” agreements in Central and Latin America. Such agreements have enabled subsidized American agri-business to flood these societies with cheap produce, thus destroying the livelihoods of millions of small farmers. The export-oriented, often capital-intensive form of manufacturing imposed by the IMF, World Bank, and the WTO on these nations also limits the number of good jobs in their urban economy of these developing nations. The same story can be told about North African migration to the nations of the European Union. In their inexorable search for cheap, exploitable wage labor, predominantly United States-owned transnational corporations have eliminated hundreds of thousands of maquiladora jobs in Mexico and moved them to Vietnam and China, where even more repressive states make labor cheaper and more vulnerable still. Thus, the neo-liberal model of corporate globalization, which strives for maximum profitability through ruthless cost-cutting, does not even provide stable industrial employment for newly industrializing societies. The “push” for mass immigration from the developing world can only be stemmed if these economies are allowed to develop in equitable and internally integrated ways. Such development would require the national and international regulation of corporate power by free trade unions and democratic governments, as well as the democratization of international economic regulatory institutions. But the “pull factors” which draw immigrant labor to our nation and which are promoted by conscious and unconscious United States policies must also be understood. The effort over the past twenty years by the meat and poultry processing industry to replace unionized workers with vulnerable undocumented labor should tell us that certain corporate sectors consciously recruit undocumented labor. In addition, much of the professional-managerial sector of this country exploits undocumented workers to provide them with cheaper child care and personal services. The ambivalence of Republican Party elites toward both punitive and just forms of “immigration reform” (e.g. mass deportation efforts or a rapid road to citizenship for all undocumented workers) is parsimoniously explained by the fact that agribusiness, the hotel and restaurant industry, and food processors all embrace the current vulnerable status of undocumented labor. The vulnerability of undocumented and guest workers not only leads to the exploitation of their labor, but also to the proliferation of low-wage, unsafe, and insecure jobs for all. Employers can more easily discriminate against AfricanAmericans, particularly young men, when there is vulnerable immigrant labor to exploit. Only strong enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, combined with the ability of all workers to unionize and fight for decent wage and working conditions, can yield a full employment economy. The nativist arguments of the Minutemen and others displaces anxiety about declining economic opportunities onto the very low-wage workers whose rights in the workplace must be secured if all working people are to improve their livelihoods. One way of insuring this would be to raise the ridiculously low legal immigration quotas for lowwage workers so that they would have secure, permanent resident status and full

Racism, Difference, and Social Solidarity 161 labor rights. Furthermore, guest worker programs only serve to exploit these workers and undercut workers’ rights to organize to secure humane wages and working conditions. Thus, the burgeoning immigrant rights movement represents a crucial movement for social justice and brings to the forefront of public debate issues central to a democratic and just society. Legalizing the status of all immigrant workers and their immediate families, as well as providing for a transparent and expeditious road to citizenship, embodies basic democratic principles. Those who contribute meaningful, necessary labor to a society and who are governed by its laws should have an equal say in the making of those laws. Finally, absent legal status, an expeditious road to citizenship, and full civil, political, and social rights, immigrant workers cannot fight for rights on the job and can be ruthlessly exploited by employers. Threatening to deport undocumented workers, as well as second-class status in guest-worker programs, restricts the capacity of all workers to organize. Thus, current immigration policies serve to create a new form of indentured servitude and dependence that threaten the democratic rights of all citizens.17 The growth in “white consciousness” arose not only from this transformation in the political economy and demographics, but also out of white political resistance to the efforts of the 1960s to bestow full social rights upon the poor and communities of color. As the work of Jill Quadango and Margaret Weir depressingly demonstrates, much of the Republican national presidential electoral resurgence from Nixon onwards arose from political elites’ cultivation of the politics of white backlash. Reagan overtly played to this politics in his 1980 campaign by creating the mythical story of the Detroit “welfare queen” who parlayed the alleged use of eight illegal welfare checks to the purchase of a Cadillac. The Willie Horton ads in 1988 contributed to George Bush Sr.’s victory over Michael Dukakis. In part motivated by the Republican use of the politics of race, the fiscally-moderate Democratic Leadership Council, formed in the early 1980s, urged the Democrats not to be overly solicitous of the “special interests” of trade unionists, feminists, and, in particular, people of color. In retrospect, the legal desegregation of the United States in 1964–1965 represents a highpoint in the nation’s struggle for racial justice. After the passage of the civil rights acts, further attempts to redress the radical disparities in socioeconomic opportunities between white and non-white citizens would be defeated, with the abandonment of any federal commitment to anti-poverty efforts culminating with Nixon’s dismantling of the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1973. By that date, all attempts at integration of housing, crossmetropolitan busing, universal child care, and guaranteed income had been defeated in Congress by an alliance of the white South with middle-class suburbanites, white ethnic urban defenders of neighborhood turf, as well as Chamber of Commerce (and AFL craft union) opposition meaningful job training.18 Thus, the development of “white consciousness” has a real material and structural history to it. “Deconstructing” such a consciousness would necessitate the development of a counter-hegemonic vision of a democratic racial and class order, as well as a credible political agenda that unites working- and middle-class

162 The Future of Democratic Equality voters across the divide of race and nationality. Cultural theorists ask whites to “resist” their whiteness by “deconstructing” it through acts of “performative resistance” (such as lecturing cab-drivers who take them over a longer-waiting person of color19). These are important expressions of personal solidarity across racial lines, but they seem inordinately focused upon symbolic and linguistic acts, while underplaying (or “dematerializing”) the structural political, economic, and cultural realities that constrain “discursive” possibilities. “White-skin” privilege can be partly redressed by whites intervening in support of people of color organizing against police harassment, hypersurveillance in retail stores, and blatant employer-discrimination (including by African-American employers) against entry-level minority job applicants, particularly African-American inner-city males. But combating racism also demands the development of a politics of structural redistribution of class and racial power that goes well beyond (and confronts more powerful resistance) than do “postmodern” acts of “resistance.” These acts of resistance are good and necessary works; but faith in the radical efficacy of such acts resembles the dominant liberal ideology that racism is caused by the bad acts of malevolent individuals. Thus, strictly defining “whiteness” as a cultural marker of non-whiteness, as a negative identity of “emptiness, vacuity” in which “there is no white culture, no white politics, no whiteness, except in the case of distancing and rejection of racially-defined ‘otherness’ ”20 excessively dematerializes the social forces that construct and defend a material order of racial privilege. Conservative resistance to social rights for citizens of color has undergirded the ideological and programmatic hegemony of the right in the United States since 1968. This conservatization of United States politics is best symbolized by the fact that the Democrats, at the presidential level, have since then only been nationally competitive when they back Southern moderates who have more a rhetorical, than programmatic, commitment to racial and social equality. The presidencies of James Earl Carter and William Jefferson Clinton only mildly challenged white-skin privilege, and certainly did not take on the class prerogatives of privileged elites. (Though both are to be credited with a visceral commitment to legal forms of racial equality. In addition to radically expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, the other noteworthy progressive achievement of the Clinton administration involved its successful defense of affirmative action. The “surprising” persistence of affirmative action policies—despite considerable popular resistance—also results from many corporate elites conceiving of affirmative action as a means for creating a more diverse corporate management that can reach out to a broader “customer” base.21) Thus, analysts and activists who recognize the socio-economic—as well as ideological—structural nature of race and class domination cannot uncritically embrace an excessively post-structuralist conception of “whiteness” as a cultural trope which can be “performatively” abandoned. (As if whiteness or blackness is strictly a voluntary, discursive identity, absent how such ascriptive differences are imposed by others as barriers to equal life opportunities.) To contend that subordinate groups can “resist” the “repetitive instantiation” of their own identity

Racism, Difference, and Social Solidarity 163 by refusing to “perform” the inscribed markers of identity ignores the material reality of the “1 percent rule” in American society. That is, until 1965, any person with a drop of African blood could be subjected (through no “performative” act of their own) to the subordination of Jim Crow laws by an armed Southern state. And to this day communities of color in the United States experience not only discrimination, but also the fear and frustration brought about by police violence, biased juries, and disproportionate levels of unemployment and incarceration. “Performative” resistance to such laws frequently results in those resisting being harassed, tortured, and, to this day, sometimes, murdered.

The Ideological “Racialization of the State”: The State as Defender of “Special Interests” The academic celebration of the “post-material” nature of politics represents a peculiar cultural lag from the exceptional post-war prosperity that began to fade in the early 1970s. Rising living standards among the upper-working class and middle class facilitated the emergence of the “post-material” politics of ecology, peace, gender and racial equality, and sexual emancipation in the 1960s and 1970s.22 But democratic movements mobilized around these “non-material” issues demanded a redistribution of power and economic opportunity toward previously excluded minorities. Such demands provoked a political backlash on the part of significant sectors of the white lower-middle and working class in the constrained economic environment which followed the 1960s. Class divisions provoked by such “new social movements” were particularly striking in reaction to feminism. Primary stay-at-home female care providers married to “breadwinning” working- and lower-middle-class males have long been disproportionately represented among the shock troops of the right-to-life and “family values” constituencies (though men were often the most visible leaders).23 The new right also utilized the racial code words of law-and-order and welfare cheats to mobilize working- and lower-middle-class resentment against the social and economic gains made by minorities and women in the 1960s and 1970s. The new right successfully associated these gains with the weakening of the “normal” two-parent, male bread-winner family. In the new right’s analysis, the traditional nuclear family had been undermined by a paternalist, welfare state that supplanted the role of the bread-winning father among those on public assistance. (Of course, as the family wage eroded during the 1970s and 1980s, increasing numbers of self-defined “culturally conservative” two-parent families had both parents participating full-time in the formal work force.) The role of the federal courts in overcoming majoritarian Republican and conservative Democratic opposition to affirmative action, busing, and reproductive rights further exacerbated the perception of the state as the servant of “special interests” (i.e. people of color and feminists). The courts (nonmajoritarian institutions) briefly attempted to fulfill the democratic promise of equal substantive rights—rights which an allegedly democratic polity could not achieve through majoritarian means. The stark reality remains that there never has been a stable, permanent majority for social equality across the racial divide.

164 The Future of Democratic Equality The brief triumph of liberal ideology among the political and intellectual elite in the mid-1960s, at best, achieved a commitment to legal political and marketplace equality of opportunity, and even those gains had to be first achieved in the courts. The violent rebuff to Martin Luther King’s and SCLC’s organizing efforts in Chicago and Cicero, Illinois in 1966 demonstrated the obdurate nature of white resistance to residential and economic integration. The white majority that rejected housing integration and busing across school-district lines in the early 1970s would ultimately lead to the disappearance of the “urban question” from the national political agenda. National Democratic party elites no longer believed they could sustain a national political majority if they openly worked to address the devastation faced by the urban poor. While social scientists have noted for several decades the isolation of inner-city residents from mainstream educational and economic opportunity, this stark racial apartheid has long disappeared as a mainstream electoral political issue. What major national political figure today calls for a response to the “urban crisis”? (John Edwards is the first major Democratic presidential primary candidate to address “poverty” since George McGovern thirty-six years ago.) The Fair Housing Act of 1968 could only be passed in response to the massive ghetto riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King. Even then, the bill only gained sufficient conservative Democratic support to pass when all effective enforcement mechanisms were removed from the legislation. William Julius Wilson’s work examines how deindustrialization resulted in the loss of good unionized jobs for hundreds of thousands of male residents of the inner cities. But global economic restructuring is not the only cause of inner-city poverty. As Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton demonstrate, housing segregation continues to be a powerful cause of inner-city poverty, as most lower skilled entry-level jobs are now in the suburbs—and there exists little to no mass transit from the inner city out to the suburban and exurban sites of job growth (including warehouse jobs that do not require high levels of educational attainment).24 Thus, “race” has not declined—as much as Wilson argues—as an explanatory variable for the disproportionate rates of poverty and unemployment in the inner cities. Residential segregation kept non-whites from access to residency in moderate income suburban neighborhoods, and the resulting proximate residence to informal job networks and employment.25 Social reform achieved by majoritarian legislation will be more durable than reforms mandated by judicial fiat. But absent the building of such anti-racist majorities should not a liberal democratic legal system act to promote the equal worth of citizenship? Even if liberal policy-makers and movement activists in the 1960s had followed Wilson’s and Skocpol’s retrospective advice and rejected an expansion of means-tested programs in favor of advocating solely for universal child and health care programs, it is unlikely that such programs would have been enacted. George Wiley, Frances Fox Piven, Richard Cloward and the rankand-file of the welfare rights movement of the 1960s advocated for universal programs such as full employment, job training, and universal child care and health care. But once it became clear that such policies would not be enacted, poor people of color could only stake their claims to greater economic opportunity

Racism, Difference, and Social Solidarity 165 and resources through a minoritarian politics of insurgency. Insurgent politics by non-white constituencies in the 1960s achieved the limited, but tangible gains of enfranchisement, non-discriminatory access to human services, and desegregation of the civil service, uniformed services, and skilled trades. But the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, combined with Republican opposition to a radical expansion of activist government, limited the Great Society’s response to this pressure from below to means-tested and targeted programs, which stigmatized their beneficiaries. (The notable exceptions of Great Society programs—in terms of both their universal nature and their broad political appeal—came in regard to Medicare and the increase in the real value of Social Security, via its permanent indexation to inflation.) Even today, when the ideology of “individual responsibility” is at its height, most Americans recognize that many of the elderly cannot escape “dependency” on the caring of the younger and more able-bodied. As the failure of the Bush II administration’s attempt to “privatize” Social Security in 2005 proves once again, the passage of universal social programs creates a permanent majoritarian constituency for their defense. But means-tested, targeted programs almost immediately became vulnerable to the politics of taxpayer revolt. Even initially popular programs such as the Job Corps failed to provide opportunities in the mainstream labor market. As Margaret Weir’s work has demonstrated, the moral justification for means-tested programs focused upon the “pathologies” of the life styles of the poor—the absence of proper work habits. The programs alleged that the instilling of such habits would take care of poverty, despite the absence of a systematic transformation of the opportunity structure of urban labor markets.26 By failing to integrate the war against poverty into a comprehensive labor market and employment policy, the social reforms of the 1960s failed to provide access to and education and training for the higher-skilled, higher-wage post-industrial jobs which alone could break the cycle of poverty. Furthermore, the “covert” financing of the Vietnam War through tax bracketcreep—rather than an explicit raising of real tax rates—set the stage for the tax revolts of the late 1970s and the Reagan presidency. Reagan’s “simplification” of the tax-bracket structure rendered taxation more regressive by radically decreasing income tax progressivity and by instituting a high burden of flat-rate payroll taxes upon lower-middle- and working-class families (in order to adequately finance Social Security and Medicare).27 The intensification of inner-city poverty that resulted from the deindustrialization of the 1980s led to the expansion of the number of people resorting to means-tested social programs (despite the decline in the real value of these programs because of a failure to index their benefits to inflation). Simultaneously, overall tax rates did become more regressive. These developments provided a partial veneer of truth to the conservative ideological mantra that taxes are paid by the deserving to finance the indolence of the undeserving. (The majority of American taxpayers pay more in flat-rate payroll taxes than they do in—more progressive—income taxes.) In reality, however, at the height of the welfare reform debate in the mid1990s only 20 percent of the one-third of the federal budget devoted to social welfare expenditure went to the means-tested programs of AFDC, Food Stamps,

166 The Future of Democratic Equality and Medicaid. Social Security and Medicare continue to garner over 70 percent of the federal social welfare budget. The right claims that the federal government disproportionately spends money on “them” (read undeserving poor people of color), even though means-tested programs constituted at most 8 percent of the total federal budget. And well over half of federal means-testing anti-poverty expenditure goes to the relatively more popular Medicaid program (as children and the indigent ill are more broadly recognized to be justifiably “dependent”). The costs of these means-tested programs are outweighed several fold by the massive budget deficits of recent Republican presidencies—deficits politically constructed via massive income tax cuts for the affluent and a ramping up of our one sacrosanct form of public expenditure—the military budget. Mainstream politicians rarely criticize defense expenditures as a redistribution of income from those employed outside of defense to those employed in defense industries. Furthermore, the structure of American federalism means that the most visible public goods—uniformed services, sewage and sanitation, local roads, public education, and recreational facilities—are provided by local municipalities rather than by the state or federal government. This reality further contributes to a weakening of suburban and rural political support for federal aid to municipalities. Except for some increase in funding for low-rise public housing, the Clinton administration did little to redress the damage done to urban government fiscal health by the Reagan era. In 1981, the Reagan administration eliminated the two major federal urban economic development programs, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act and the Urban Development Action Grant program. Federal aid to the cities came to a nearly complete end with the abolition of revenue sharing in 1986 and the literal decimation of public housing funding (from twenty-one billion dollars in 1981 to 1.2 billion dollars by 1988!). While many suburban residents complain about high property taxes and undervalue their access to locally-financed social democratic levels of public provision, only a few states (most notably California and Colorado) have witnessed tax revolts so severe that they have damaged the quality of public goods provided by affluent suburban municipalities. The disproportionate reliance on regressive property taxes to fund critical public goods accentuates class and racial inequalities in regard to access to quality education, infrastructure, and public amenities. This structural inequality poses a path-dependent barrier to shifting from regressive property tax-financing to more equitable income tax (and statewide) financing of education. Affluent taxpayers implicitly like to keep quality services in their own backyard and implicitly understand that a shift to more progressive, regional and national financing of public goods would facilitate a redistribution of public resources. Suburbanites who complain about property tax rates almost always simultaneously reject county or state income tax replacement of this regressive mode of financing local public goods.28 And despite their complaints about high property tax rates (which do squeeze the working class and the nonaffluent elderly), rarely do affluent suburbs cut their property tax rates. Nor do families that have moved to such suburbs for their “good schools” choose to move to nearly communities where housing is less expensive and property tax

Racism, Difference, and Social Solidarity 167 rates are lower. That is, many Americans wish to preserve the ability for the upwardly mobile to move into (and pay the tax costs) for the Scandinavian-style level of public provision of affluent suburbs. Yet absent an expansion of progressive state and federal income tax funding of public education and health care, American democracy will unlikely redress the growth in income inequality characteristic of knowledge-based, post-industrial economies.

Affirmative Action: Lightening Rod for the Mobilization of the Politics of “White Victims” Earlier on, I touched on why federal and private sector affirmative action programs may have (at least for now) escaped the populist assault upon it at the grassroots level. But as the passage of anti-affirmative action referendums in regard to state-level affirmative action programs in California, Michigan, and Washington state demonstrate, considerable white working- and middle-strata hostility to such programs persists. Many of the white working-class students I teach at an urban public university (Temple, in Philadelphia) believe that a major barrier to their upward mobility is the alleged massive influx, due to affirmative action, of minority students into top-ranked universities and professional schools. Convincing white working-class students in a public university such as Temple (where I teach) that affirmative action’s major purpose is not to decrease the chances for white student admission into professional schools—and that 85 percent of the students they may lose out to for law school are white themselves—is no easy task. While affirmative action has not benefited those marginal to the world of paid labor, its main beneficiaries have not been the Black professional-managerial class (as William Julius Wilson asserts29) but the Black working class. Absent affirmative action, the African-American (and Latino) working class would not have gained employment in the previous racially-exclusive craft unions and civil and uniform services. Some of these jobs were always accessed via kinship ties or patronage and political connections. Some of the civil service jobs required passage of allegedly “neutral,” “meritocratic” tests (which often had little to do with the tasks involved in the actual jobs). The majority of the African-American middle class has also been created by political action and not by the workings of the “free market.” A disproportionate share of the Black middle class, as compared to white, are employed not in the private corporate sector, but as public administrators, civil servants, public educators, and members of the uniform services (plus a declining number of industrial trade unionists). The dominance of the ideology of individualism within our culture precludes most Americans from understanding how class and racial inequality interact and structurally reproduce themselves. Thus, most of the affirmative action controversy focuses upon access to scarce educational and professional jobs—places in society that are allegedly distributed by “merit” (itself a liberal marketplace concept which is insufficiently interrogated). Ronald Dworkin has analyzed how the individualist mythology of objective merit precludes Americans from recognizing that social institutions (universities, professional schools, and firms) may

168 The Future of Democratic Equality justly take into account a myriad number of factors—and not solely allegedly “objective” grades and standardized test scores—to determine who to educate as students, train as professionals, or hire as employees.30 For example, do high GPAs and MCAT scores strongly predict who will become a good communitybased physician? Would a select college student body chosen strictly by standardized test scores adequately take into account the inherent advantage these tests grant to children of parents with high educational capital? Should selective college admission staff ignore the reality that students who attend underfunded schools (and whose student body is disproportionately drawn from low-income families) score lower, on average, on standardized tests than do students from affluent suburban schools. Thus, a student with 1150 combined SATs from an impoverished rural or urban area might demonstrate more academic promise than a student with a 1350 from a prosperous suburban school that sends scores of students to select colleges. Yet the hegemonic conception of “meritocratic justice” implies that places in select colleges and professional schools should be allocated solely according to allegedly unbiased grade point averages (and most sacredly) standardized exams. According to this ideology of “objective scores” every job or educational place can be distributed according to a strict ordinal ranking, where every applicant can be assigned a “just place.” In reality, anyone who has served on a search committee for a professional job or the admissions committee of a selective institution of higher learning recognizes that there always exist a surplus of “qualified” candidates (however qualified is defined). And “qualified” candidates bring to the table various positive and negative attributes. The actual selection of the best “one” often comes down to conjunctural, particular needs of the institution (or preferences of selection committee members), needs and preferences that change over time. Thus, defenders of affirmative action have to do a better job in demystifying the supposed predictive correlation between test scores and subsequently achieved “technical expertise” in the professions. (Even the College Board admits that SATs only weakly correlate with first-year college performance and are not strong predictors of four-year college academic performance). The “techne” or skill involved in many professions is learned more by doing than from professional school course-work. More importantly, leaders in the professions need to explain that these jobs demand much more than the skills allegedly demonstrated by pre-professional test scores—such as an understanding and commitment to one’s patients and clients. While people of color and women should not be disproportionately tracked into the more public-oriented aspects of the professions—such as community legal services, “human resource management,” or preventive medicine—there is no doubt that such valuable jobs are unlikely to be well-performed by a disproportionately white male workforce. The alleged “meritocratic” replenishing of the professional (and professorial) ranks disproportionately by the children of white professionals is simply not consonant with the aims of a democratic pluralist society. The defense of affirmative action needs to reiterate a first order principle— that traditional biases overlook candidates of equal potential ability or past

Racism, Difference, and Social Solidarity 169 accomplishment. Affirmative action never mandated the hiring of or admission of “less qualified” candidates; rather, the concept contends that structural and individual biases lead to the passing over by traditional selection procedures of many women and minority candidates of high potential. Even on the basis of the limits of predictive indicators, the formal “qualifications” of affirmative action candidates are often nearly comparable to those chosen by traditional measures. Immediately after the passage of Proposition 209 in California (banning affirmative action in state institutions) the University of California at Berkeley in 1998 rejected for freshman admission eight hundred African-American and Latino applicants with 4.0 high school GPAs and over 1200 combined SATs scores! A recent Boston Globe article pointed out that far greater absolute numbers of “under-qualified” white students are admitted to highly select colleges and universities than are minorities who lack “traditional admission profiles.” That is, there are far larger numbers of white “legatees” and white athletes with “substandard” admission profiles admitted to Ivy League and elite liberal arts colleges than there are students of color. (The Ivies and select colleges recruit large numbers of male and female athletes drawn from the suburban and prep-school dominated men’s and women’s sports of lacrosse, field hockey, ice hockey, cross country, tennis, squash and soccer than they do in football and basketball—the only two sports in which large numbers of black athletes will be found at select institutions). Yet, as I argued in the chapter on the politics of difference, too many defenders of affirmative action have bought into the “reverse discrimination” argument, claiming that history justifies preferential treatment for women and minority candidates. Such defenses will never gain the support of a democratic majority. In Iris Marion Young’s view, the predominant function of professional jobs is to confer power and prestige upon their holders. The alleged skills and competencies involved in performing technical or professional tasks appear to be, in Young’s view, mostly social constructions which have little, if anything, to do with actual competence.31 Michael Walzer’s more reasoned and qualified defense of affirmative action recognizes that some jobs necessitate certain skills (in any good society, surgeons will have to be manually dexterous and good therapists will have to be empathetic). What he objects to is the irrelevant prestige and monetary rewards conferred upon individuals by their professional status. Walzer contends that in so far as professional and management jobs distribute prestige, economic privilege, and power—goods not intrinsic to the practices of good lawyering, doctoring, or managing—then why should the job selection or academic admission process not take into account race and gender (while ensuring that candidates have the necessary intellectual or technical capacities to perform adequately in these positions32). But Walzer’s focus on the unjust social imperialism of professional credentials leads him to demure in regard to the argument about whether present methods of recruitment into these professions are themselves gender and racially-biased. The persistence of ongoing, present discrimination—particularly absent affirmative efforts to curtail such biases—is the most powerful defense of affirmative action. Contemporary white Americans, particularly the

170 The Future of Democratic Equality children or grand-children of immigrants, rarely can be convinced that they benefit strongly from “white skin privilege” or are indirectly responsible for the legacies of slavery. What they do not know—and ought to—is that numerous studies demonstrate that even in low-skill service and industrial jobs, employers (including, at times, African-American employers) frequently discriminate against African-Americans, particularly young males. The same is true, controlling for income and personal finances, for access to credit. That is, “white skin privilege” persists not just because the average white family possesses ten times as much wealth as the average Black or Latino family, but also because unconscious prejudice and “in-group” “boys club” behavior persists in regard to job and social networks. Most self-reflective, honest older white male members of academic departments would admit just how much more white and male their department would be absent affirmative action policy. But William Julius Wilson is correct to argue that the affirmative action controversy obscures the reality that the program does little to help those who do not possess solid educational credentials and a prior employment history. While labor participation rates within inner cities are much higher than the suburbanite perception of a homogenous underclass, the unemployment rates, particularly among African-American males aged sixteen to twenty-four, is of crisis proportions. Affirmative action alone cannot redress the consignment of masses of inner-city youth, either to dead-end, low-wage, low-benefit service jobs or to a life within the confines of the criminal justice system. The inability of Americans to think in a complex manner about the interaction of class and race undergirds the politics of racial resentment.33 On the one hand, many white working-class people intuitively—and correctly—grasp that our society fails to recognize the barriers class inequality poses for substantive equality of opportunity. On the other hand, few whites acknowledge the continued viciousness of the color line and how it cuts across class lines—from the inability of African-American males to get a cab in any city, to racial profiling by the police, to persistent residential segregation, and to credit and job discrimination. Even among African-American professional households (two parent/career families earning over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars) the legacy of generations of racism is that such families only own, on average, 20 percent of the assets of whites with comparable income and educational attainment levels. (Why? White professionals tend to be the descendants of several generations of professional families while today’s African-American professionals are usually first generation.34) I am not proposing a pseudo-scientific weighing of comparative class, racial, or gender oppression, particularly as these oppressions interdependently structure late capitalist society. But, in the American imaginary race and gender discrimination are caused by malicious individuals rather than by the workings of racist and sexist social structures. But the structural inequalities of class cannot be subsumed under the analytic rubric of individualist, personal prejudice. Thus, few students are taught that class inequalities, as well as racial and gender hierarchies, pose structural barriers to equality of opportunity. Hence, the persistent myth that we are a “classless” society, even though American social mobility

Racism, Difference, and Social Solidarity 171 rates are now lower than those of Northern Europe (Germany, France, Scandinavia) and no better than “class-bound” Britain.35 In Northern Europe the life opportunities of working-class young adults without a college education are better than those of their American counterparts due to superior apprentice programs and on-the-job training. In addition, one’s achieved position within the labor market does not as radically determine the quality of life for oneself and one’s family. Of course, those with higher educational, cultural, and economic capital are advantaged in Northern Europe—class, of course, still matters. But the impact of economic inequality on life opportunities for workers and their children is cushioned in Europe by greater leisure time, shorter work lives, more generous public pensions, and, most importantly, universal health care. While affirmative action programs remain necessary to redress the persistent caste discrimination of race and gender, they will not garner significant white working- and middle-class support unless a class component is added. Proposals to subsume all affirmative action consideration under the rubric of class, however, would radically inhibit such programs’ ability to take into account the relative autonomous factor of continuing racial and gender discrimination. (And, given American demographics, the largest group of beneficiaries of strictly class-based programs would be whites.36) But unless educators and public intellectuals patiently and persistently explain how class inequality affects the life opportunities of lower income Americans of all races, the future for all forms of egalitarian social policy in the United States will remain dim.

Farewell to Universality? Or, Can Democratic Difference Survive Apart from Pluralist Commonality? As global inflation and competition rendered the liberal and social-democratic Keynesian growth model problematic by the late 1970s, the neo-conservative, free-market paradigm of untrammeled capital accumulation, government deregulation and deunionization emerged as the dominant moral and political economy of Western democracies. Wrapped in the values of the work ethic, entrepreneurship, and the fairness and efficiency of the market, neo-Smithian deregulation emerged as a new, alternative “regime of accumulation” to an exhausted Keynesian liberalism (and its more developed social democratic European cousin). This crisis of the post-war Keynesian regime of accumulation severely frayed the class-based political alliance of progressive middle strata, white working class, and insurgent minorities that underpinned the New Deal liberal coalition in the United States. As this coalition decomposed, a defensive politics of “identity” fought against the pseudo-universalist politics of the new right’s assault on privileged “special interests.” Many left (mostly white male) intellectuals exhort progressives to organize around economic “bread-and-butter issues” and return to a class-based politics that appeals to the cross-racial needs of the working and middle class. But what these scholars (whom historian Jesse Lemisch terms the “angry white males of the lettered class”37) fail to understand is how the conservative politics of white backlash used the “raced and gendered” imagery of indolent, undeserving

172 The Future of Democratic Equality minorities, who rip off the state, and elitist “femi-nazis” who de-value and destabilize the nuclear family, to appeal to a white male working class dislocated and displaced by deindustrialization.38 Despite the longings of these analysts for a rebirth of the New Deal coalition, the 1980 triumph of Reagan signaled the demise of American liberalism as a majoritarian political force. Thus, in light of the long odds against a union-led liberal coalition regaining national political power (symbolized by Reagan’s defeat of the NOW and AFL-CIO backed 1984 Mondale presidential campaign), feminists and activists of color found themselves fighting defensive battles against the right’s attack on the hard-earned gains of the 1960s. But one need not be a class reductionist to note that the broad progressive movement has been severely weakened by the successful war on the labor movement initiated by corporate elites in the early 1970s and institutionalized by the state from Reagan onwards. As I argued in Chapter 3, some intellectual advocates of “identity politics” overestimate the ability of an ethics of “difference” to ground a politics capable of redistributing economic and political power (including gender and racial power). But most of the activists who struggled in the 1980s and 1990s to defend affirmative action, reproductive rights, and means-tested anti-poverty programs did not actively oppose the rebirth of universalist, labor-based social democratic politics. Rather, such a possibility did not appear on the political radar screen. Tragic though it may be, left politics since 1980 has been defensive in nature— defending the limited, but real gains of the civil rights, gay and lesbian, and women’s movements of the 1970s and 1980s. As Piven and Cloward argued against those on the left who favored “welfare reform,” abandoning AFDC did not yield universal child care and income support, but rather a patchwork of make-work job programs and low-wage, benefit-less employment. The increased vulnerability of the poor, particularly poor children, will gain increased visibility during the likely upcoming recession. (“Welfare reform” being introduced during the tightest labor markets since the 1960s masked some of its potentially disastrous long-term consequences.39) Not only will private sector employment opportunities decline, but so will the modest state budget expenditures for job training, child care, and transport subsidies, as fiscal austerity accompanies declining state revenues. False juxtapositions drive too much of contemporary academic and policy debate; contrary to social-democratic academics judging all means-tested programs to be inherently unpopular and vulnerable, Head Start and Medicaid have fairly broad support, as they are not as strongly associated with race as was AFDC. On the other hand, mistrust of public provision and disbelief in the possibility of progressive taxation is enhanced by the right’s use of racial “frames” of all public provision as inefficient and dependency-creating. What Rorty, Gitlin, et al., fail to countenance is that it is precisely a right-wing “racial politics” which devalues not only “special interests” and means-tested programs, but also universal public provision. For if the state “gives” everyone a basic good—such as health care—without having to earn it in the private labor market, then it enhances dependency. Thus, to build majoritarian support for a social democratic policy agenda necessitates not only the construction of a majoritarian

Racism, Difference, and Social Solidarity 173 “rainbow coalition” of labor, progressive whites, and communities of color; such a coalition also has to demystify the state’s role in public provision, much of which (in the form of Social Security, Medicare and tax-benefits for pension fund savings) currently benefits the middle-class (which has greater longevity) more than it serves the urban working class and poor. The racial “reordering” of the Reagan-Thatcher era destroyed the former hegemony of post-war American liberal and European social democratic politics. The ideology of the right did not simply promulgate a harsh equality of marketplace competition that accentuated the gap between the culturally-andeconomically advantaged and the disadvantaged. The respectable right rallied behind this doctrine of race-blindness and hostility to “quotas,” while the harder, “nativist” new right manipulated white working-class resentment of their downward social mobility into a belief that communities of color have experienced preferential economic and social treatment over the past two decades (when, in reality, life-opportunities in the bottom-third of those communities have deteriorated at alarming rates). The ideological nature of this politics is both striking and resilient. Progressives can shout loudly that a large majority of adult men of color are full participants in the labor force (despite the decline in decent-paying, unionized, industrial jobs). We can shout that the vast majority of state social welfare and tax policy benefits the middle- and upper class (defense spending, payment to affluent holders of government debt, agribusiness subsidies, home mortgage deductions, even Medicare and Social Security) and is financed disproportionately by regressive flat-rate taxation. We can attest that regressive property-tax financing of schools, infrastructure, and uniform services further accentuates inequality. Yet a considerable portion of the American polity adheres (to one degree or another) to the conservative myth that the government is primarily a redistribution machine from the deserving to undeserving, from whites to people of color. For several decades of conservative political dominance, the American left has learned to survive by adopting Gramsci’s admonition to combine optimism of the will with pessimism of the intellect. Thus, our optimistic side might point to trade union gains in organizing among predominantly immigrant and female hotel, home care, and janitorial workers (note: among workers whose jobs cannot be threatened with outsourcing). Such stirrings may bode well for a new union movement that is anti-racist and feminist in its orientation. Moderate economists such as Alan Blinder now acknowledge that outsourcing can threaten middle-class jobs that require higher levels of educational attainment. But any successful mobilization against rampant social inequality must be rooted both in the internal mobilization of communities of color and also on the construction of a majoritarian alliance with (significant portions of the) white working and middle strata. Many whites are experiencing the economic costs of global economic restructuring. Growing sectors of the struggling middle class face the threat of falling into the bottom-third of American society, a “precariot” of deunionized low-wage workers confronted with a shrinking social wage and the disappearance of employer-supplied social insurance. The absence of affordable quality education, health care, elder care, and child care means that private

174 The Future of Democratic Equality affluence is shrinking and public squalor is growing among middle America. Perhaps a politics of “making work pay”—via progressive tax and social policy— could unite a struggling middle class with working people of all races who cannot piece together a decent quality of life for their children and themselves strictly through their earnings in the formal labor market. Yet the ideological, “raced” legacy of the right’s attack upon a dying Keynesian liberalism remains considerable. One only need consider how denigrated public provision and progressive taxation is in the eyes of most Americans. Thus, the ideological, if not electoral, hegemony of the right may be so great that the nation will not even see truly affordable, universal health care reform in the next decade, despite the obvious crisis in both coverage and cost. Even at the end of the Clinton administration, amidst (ever-so-brief) rosy predictions of massive budget surpluses, mainstream Democratic politicians preferred to create budget surpluses rather than to address our nation’s desperate need to repair and replace fraying infrastructure and expand funding of public education, job training, and child and health care. Few can remember the platform of the 2000 Gore campaign—all it promised was the continuation of Clinton-era prosperity and a balanced budget (i.e. it hoped to preserve the uptick in the business cycle!). If in 1970 Richard Nixon declared “we are all Keynesians now,” by the eve of the next millennium, by the Clinton era, Keynes was long forgotten. So was the hardlearned lesson of the Great Depression and the post-World War II era of the GI Bill that government spending—even deficit-spending via borrowing—can pay itself back over the long run if invested in education and infrastructure that enhance society’s productivity and wealth. The obsessive fear of higher taxes (and a complete disbelief that taxes could be structured in a progressive manner), plus an absence of faith in the capacity of government remains quite pervasive among swing white middle-strata voters. But this “raced” ideological hostility to progressive taxation and public provision cannot be successfully “end-runned” by either neo-liberal or social democratic appeals to a race-blind, universalist politics of rights and responsibilities. The long-term war of position for the democratic left must explicitly combat the racist debasement of the public sector and the loss of popular faith in the ability of the democratic state to provide those public goods necessary for citizens to live fulfilling lives in civil society. There is no road to de-racializing American politics through a universal politics of citizenship when the very concept of citizenship is contested and constructed on the terrain of racial discourse and perceptions. On the other hand, contrary to the implicit strategy of some advocates of a “politics of difference,” social change cannot be achieved solely by the mobilization of “oppressed” constituencies. The real challenge for democratic activists and intellectuals is not that of choosing between a false antinomy between unity and diversity (or universality and difference), but of reconstructing a politics of pluralist democratic solidarity. While a house divided may not stand, a class-and-race divided nation can never fulfill the promise of democratic equality. The right-wing program of a politics of privatization and policing of the inner cities may not preclude economic distress, nihilism, and crime from visiting suburban white working- and middle-

Racism, Difference, and Social Solidarity 175 class enclaves. But whether or not this occurs, there is no teleological guarantee that the political response to increasing social dislocation among the vast middle of American society will be progressive. Such an outcome will be determined by what public intellectuals and political activists do to contest the racial construction of American politics.

8

Conclusion—Ending the False Antinomy of “Difference” and “Equality” Toward an Egalitarian Democratic Pluralism

The Future of Democratic Equality examines the challenge that growing social inequality and decline in support for the welfare state poses for activists and intellectuals who believe that political democracy can only be realized under conditions of social equality. The work does not offer a comprehensive strategy for how a politics of social solidarity can be revived in a post-industrial America divided not only by class, but also by race, gender, educational attainment, and national origin. But I hope to have demonstrated that a democratic pluralist polity that affirms the value of “difference” can only be achieved if the ethos of solidarity—a sense that the fate of each citizen affects the destiny of all—is revived as a public philosophy underpinning majoritarian support for social rights. Theoretical analysis can only help inform political practice; strategic questions will only be answered by those engaged in real world politics. But political and social theory, at its best, informs public intellectual debate and influences the moral fabric of the broader community. The 1970s witnessed the end of steady post-war economic growth in real incomes for average Americans. It also saw the demise of the liberal-conservative American political consensus in favor of moderate levels of public provision. In the academy, libertarian conservatives criticized the welfare state for creating dependency, while “communitarians” held that liberalism’s stress on individual rights precluded the development of those local communities that could sustain mutual aid.1 By the 1980s, feminists and other theorists influenced by poststructuralism expressed increasing ambivalence toward the left’s traditional commitment to social solidarity. These critics contended that the universal norms of the bureaucratic welfare state often homogenized the distinct needs of particular groups.2 This book argues that the sharp distinction between the universal norms of citizenship and the needs of particular groups drawn by some advocates of a “politics of difference” represents a false dichotomy. Only when the democratic state has used its coercive (taxing and expenditure) power to restructure marketplace outcomes have life opportunities for rank-and-file citizens been enhanced. Thus, improving the lives of members of subordinate communities depends upon a reconstruction of a sense of shared obligations among citizens, as political majorities remain necessary to achieve egalitarian reforms. While a pluralist democracy must sustain freedom of association for the particular communities

178 The Future of Democratic Equality that constitute civil society, the members of such communities cannot experience equal life opportunities unless they have equitable access to societal resources. Thus, the political challenge confronting both democratic theory and practice is not the false antinomy of “universality” versus “difference” but, rather, that of reconstructing a pluralist conception of shared citizenship. T.H. Marshall wrote in the late 1940s of the inexorable drive of democratic polities to institutionalize “social rights.” He argued that the democratic commitment to the equal moral worth of persons would create majoritarian working- and middle-class support for the public provision of those goods (e.g. education, health care, child care) necessary for equal citizenship.3 Among political sociologists and comparative politics scholars of the early 1970s his essay achieved almost canonical status as an explanation of the seeming left-right consensus in favor of the welfare state. Left social scientists even went so far as to argue that political democracy’s need to legitimate itself through generous welfare state provision would run into conflict with the corporate drive for profit.4 Many of these theorists envisioned that this conflict would give rise to left governments that tried to socialize control over profits via public governance of pension funds (Sweden’s Meidner Plan) or greater government control over investment (via the 1981–1983 nationalizations of major corporations carried out by the Mitterand government). Few, if any, of these theorists predicted that the right (particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States) would build a populist majoritarian politics in favor of deregulation, de-unionization, and welfare state cutbacks, particularly of means-tested programs. Despite the striking increase in class and racial inequality over the past three decades, there has been surprisingly little work in political philosophy analyzing the adverse consequences for political democracy of growing inequality. The first section of the book explored why much of political theory has turned away from a normative analysis of real-world politics. In part, this resulted from contemporary political philosophy’s absorption in a rather parochial debate among Rawlsian liberals, communitarians, scholars of “difference” and poststructuralists that focused upon the epistemological and ontological conceptions of the self that allegedly underpin the philosophy of social welfare liberalism. Ironically, this debate transpired just as popular support for the welfare state eroded. To this day, many communitarians and post-structuralist scholars write as if the Rawlsian “rational contractee” remains the dominant “figure” in a hegemonic liberal culture.5 Rawlsian social democracy (or in American terms, New Deal liberalism) ceased being the dominant political practice in the U.S. and advanced industrial world just as Rawls’s work asserted that a political majority for social welfare liberalism existed in “reflective equilibrium” with his redistributive principles of justice. Rawls himself retreated from the defense of these substantive principles of justice by focusing his later writings on the “overlapping consensus” of procedural rights that must exist, if liberal democracy is to survive among adherents to distinct and conflicting conceptions of “the good.”6 In the late twentieth century, as American conservatives supplanted a robust conception of political, civil, and social rights with a barebones adherence to the rights of property, post-structuralist theorists continued to talk of emancipating

Conclusion 179 the self from the “norming,” restrictive system of “liberal rights.” Doing so, they claimed, would open our “decentered” selves to the “agonal” struggle for power. Such an agonal struggle for power has occurred over the past thirty years; but corporate power and a right-wing racist and sexist populism has triumphed in this struggle. The “false universal” of the dominant ideology is no longer the “rational chooser” of social welfare liberalism, but the universal “chooser” of the “free market.” This past twenty years or so of debate among political theorists seemed peculiarly oblivious to public disquiet with the popular ideological manifestations of each respective academic theory. Rights-based liberalism since the mid-1970s has been identified by dominant conservative discourse with the defense of “undeserving special interests.” Many people of color, feminists, and gays and lesbians fear that communitarian calls for a return to “community values” are code words for authoritarian and patriarchal norms. And still other Americans are dismayed by, rather than celebrants of, “postmodern” class and racial fragmentation. Such dismay often takes reactionary populist forms of white working-class resentment against allegedly “elitist” feminists or “indolent” minority welfare recipients. The primarily normative first section of The Future of Democratic Equality aimed at a political, if not philosophical, reconciliation among radical (social) democrats and democratic advocates of a “politics of difference.” If those who favor a pluralist “politics for difference” believe in the equality of all citizens to fulfill their life projects, then they must consider how to achieve equality amidst difference. And if post-structuralist “radical democrats” take seriously the egalitarian potential of democratic citizenship, then they cannot embrace the “agonal politics” of an unregulated market in which powerful minority elites dominate weaker, but more numerous, marginalized communities. That is, if power is to be redistributed in a democratic fashion, post-structuralist radical democrats cannot eschew strategic consideration of how to achieve majoritarian coalitions that will use state power to reign in corporate power. As Terry Eagleton wrote in After Theory, in the defensive stance of the post-1960s left, radical theorists lost interest not only in (falsely) universal classes, but also in majoritarian coalition politics.7 But absent democratic majorities, insurgent or marginalized groups remain just that—marginalized and dis-empowered. Self-defined liberal, communitarian, and postmodern “democrats” all claim to reject conservative critiques of democracy and equality; yet overly academic, metaphysical disputes have precluded a pragmatic search for common political ground. Contrary to conservative stereotypes of liberals as favoring rights without obligations, a politics of democratic solidarity recognizes the integral social relationship between rights and obligations in a democratic polity. In contrast to communitarian rejections of rights as socially atomizing, the concept of democratic solidarity holds that the good of a pluralist community necessitates those political and social rights that guarantee equal political voice. Finally, contrary to the fears of “difference theorists” that “universal” concepts such as citizenship suppress diversity, a politics of social solidarity contends that “difference” can only be empowering if the particular communities of a polity

180 The Future of Democratic Equality share a sufficient sense of common membership so as to sustain a strong compliment of social rights. Public provision of basic human needs might, at times, be most effectively provided by decentralized voluntary associations within civil society (e.g. non-profit day care centers; community-governed health clinics). But to insure social equality, the state would still play a central role in both financing such programs and setting minimal standards of provision. In their hostility to a bureaucratic, paternalistic welfare state, both post-structuralist feminists and communitarians forget that the power of the democratic state is the only means for rectifying the inegalitarian distribution of a market capitalist economy. Contemporary radical theory’s hostility (or, at best, indifference) to the state perhaps derives from a disdain to speak of state power in an era when the center and right largely govern the state. But to cede state power to procorporate forces is to abandon the project of democratic equality. Contemporary political theory does not adequately confront growing social inequality because of its anti-political and overly epistemological concern with conceptions of the self. This orientation eschews social theory’s project of combining normative inquiry with historical and economic analysis. Thus, the second section of the book develops a moral and political economy of the decline of social welfare liberalism (and European social democracy), a decline that denuded American liberalism and European social democracy of the dominant ideological and political position it had occupied in the 1960s and much of the 1970s. This section analyzed the decline in social solidarity as a manifestation of a post-industrial and globalized economy. But it also demonstrated that politics, not determinate structural economic changes, drove much of the growth in inequality in the United States (and the United Kingdom). Undoubtedly “globalization” engendered a loss in industrial manufacturing jobs and contributed to the decline in real earnings power among workers vulnerable to international competition. But the ideology of “globalization” also served as a tool to justify a massive government and corporate attack on union rights and public provision. These attacks contributed to a decline in real wages in sectors invulnerable to outsourcing. Corporate America cannot outsource construction or local government work—but it could and did weaken union power (and, concomitantly, real wages and living standards) in these two sectors. In meat and poultry packing, food processing, and warehouse work, corporations often closed union plants and then reopened plants with a newly recruited workforce of vulnerable undocumented workers. The deregulation of the previously highly unionized telecommunications, airline, and utility industries also contributed to downward pressure on wages and living standards. Finally, the upward redistribution of income and wealth engendered by conservative “tax reform” cannot be traced to the inexorable structural pressure of globalization and deindustrialization. Just as the causes of growing inequality had political more than economic causes, so did the weakness of the progressive response to growing corporate power. Right-wing populism out-organized a progressive movement divided between affluent social liberals and a bureaucratized labor movement that did not immediately rise to the task of organizing immigrant and predominantly minority and female service sector workers. The social and economic

Conclusion 181 transformation of late capitalism not only has eroded traditional forms of class solidarity, but has also engendered a growing ideological, “racial consciousness” among white middle and working class strata. This consciousness is grounded in beliefs that immigration poses a threat to their standard of living and that social welfare policies, particularly “welfare” and affirmative action, disproportionately benefit “undeserving” people of color. The second half of the book investigated the decline of the American welfare state via a comparative analysis of how the history of American liberalism (our weaker version of social democracy) rendered our welfare state more vulnerable to attack than the social democracies of Western and Northern Europe. Though global economic pressures have engendered moderate welfare state retrenchment in Western Europe, those nations start from more generous levels of universal provision and greater middle-strata support for public goods. The Great Society, in part because of the relative weakness of the American ideological left, redressed the exclusion of citizens of color from the universal programs of the New Deal and GI Bill largely through means-tested social welfare programs aimed at alleviating poverty. In the 1960s, liberal policy intellectuals advocated “cost-effective” social programs that would target the poor (AFDC, Medicaid, Food Stamps). Contending that the universal social welfare programs of West European social democracy (e.g. national health care, universal children’s allowances or publicly-financed day care) were too radical or expensive, “pragmatic” liberals expanded the American welfare state through moral appeals to the relatively advantaged majority to alleviate poverty and discrimination against communities of color. The response did not solely arise from altruism, but also as a response to the political mobilization—and violent protest—of inner city communities. The end of 1960s affluence and subsequent stagnation in the real wages of average families resulted in the majority of the allegedly “privileged” no longer feeling they could afford to be generous. The means-tested programs were particularly vulnerable to white (and also minority) working-class resentment because of the perverse work-disincentives of programs whose benefits cease completely when their former recipients earn above a certain level. Thus, working families whose earnings placed them above the poverty line often resented those on AFDC and Medicaid who received state support for child care (allowing single mothers to stay at home with young children) and health care. (The Medicaid trap ironically drove many working poor single mothers back onto welfare in order to keep state-funded health care for their children.) In response to the right’s hegemonic “deconstruction” of the “New Deal coalition”—ironically through an attack on Great Society means-tested programs—a consensus emerged among prominent left-liberal social scientists (William Julius Wilson, Theda Skocpol) that new social policy initiatives in such areas as child care, health care, and a meaningful public jobs program should be universal in nature, that is, designed to benefit the entire populace (while, of course, disproportionately aiding the poor).8 But to rebuild such support, the left will have to reverse the right’s success at debasing the public’s valuation of all forms of public provision. The right’s affirmative political program is in deep

182 The Future of Democratic Equality crisis. There is a limit to how much and how long a political majority will sustain upwardly redistributive policies that primarily benefit the upper 10 percent of the population. In addition, the right’s imperial militarist project promised security from “the terrorists” but only brought the loss of American lives in the Iraqi quagmire. But the right still has one major firewall preserving its domestic conservative agenda—popular mistrust of taxation (and failure to believe that progressive tax reform is possible) and popular suspicion of any expansion of government provision. Many white “Reagan Democrats” view taxation as inherently regressive and perceive an expansion of public goods as additional wasteful work-disincentives that disproportionately benefit the inner-city. Any adequate study of social division in contemporary America must not only investigate growing racial and ethnic diversity (and the potential power of the Latino vote, once a greater proportion of that populace gains citizenship and voting rights). But amidst the emergence of the United States as only a 70 percent “white” society (though the electorate remains close to 80 percent white) has been the concomitant growth of a collective identity of “whiteness” which has displaced ethnic and religious identities among many Americans of “European” origin. Such an identity is constructed around the conception of a “work ethic” which holds that goods provided through private purchase by one’s hardearned labor are inherently superior to public goods. Hence, even private schools and private health care are viewed as superior to public schools, often even by middle-class whites whose children benefit from good suburban schools and efficient Medicare reimbursement. Even though many working- and middle-class Americans have inadequate health care coverage (or none at all), the right’s attack on moderate national health insurance plans (which would not displace the controlling influence of private insurance companies) as “socialized medicine” remains quite potent. Of course, the lobbying and campaign contributions of the insurance, pharmaceutical, and for-profit health care industry (as well as the pro-corporate bias and provincial nature of mainstream American journalists) sustains the reactionary disinformation campaign against other nation’s universal health care systems. In addition, global economic integration has allegedly eroded the precondition of Keynesian welfare state policy—the autonomy of national economies. Both conservatives and radicals who believe that a decline in living standards is necessitated by globalization have exaggerated the decline of effective national economic policy. The state, particularly one that governs a domestic market as large as that of the United States, will remain the primary locus for policy responses to global economic restructuring. But a democratic response to economic globalization will also necessitate greater coordination of economic policy among states, as well as cross-border strategic cooperation among social movements (particularly race and gender-conscious labor movements). For even in highly-skilled labor intensive industries such as computer software design, global downward pressure on wages is already a reality. Given the greater mobility of capital rather than labor, only a “global Keynesian” levelling-up of living standards can supplant the downward pressures on wages and social welfare of the “neo-liberal” policy-consensus of right and center-left global policy elites. Such a

Conclusion 183 “levelling-up” strategy of global Keynesianism must involve progressivelygoverned states cooperating to (re)construct international trade and investment agreements so that they place upward pressure on global labor, environmental, and human rights standards. As recent immigrants from the developing world and Eastern Europe increasingly constitute the service sector and casual labor force of West European democracies, the “American” project of building social solidarity while respecting diversity is rapidly losing its “exceptional” status. A primary irony of late capitalism is that just when resistance to globalization’s cultural homogenization has revived anti-modernist forms of traditional identity, the democratic project must, out of necessity, pursue international forms of solidarity which heretofore were only the utopian, unrealized aspirations of the left. Thus, the “politics of difference” transpires upon a terrain of structural inequality that renders a pure politics of difference a futile, and potentially selfdamaging, project. A modicum of social justice cannot be achieved in America without redistribution of resources between suburban and urban communities through the pooling of tax revenues and the construction of metropolitan institutions. The predominant (and inaccurate) perception on the part of white suburbanites that inner city life is that of a homogenous, drug-infested underclass precludes the development of the moral bonds necessary for overcoming the geographical, class, and cultural chasms that undergird our polity’s failure to confront growing economic and racial inequality. But if smashing heterosexist, homogenizing conceptions of citizenship renders politics nothing more than a Nietzschean will-to-power among groups who share nothing in common but the competition for scarce resources, then the outcome will be the reproduction of existing group inequality. But nor can the left be revived by returning to a supposed halcyon day of working-class solidarity. This anachronistic longing is reiterated in recent works of “populist leftism” by such authors as Todd Gitlin, Richard Rorty, Thomas Frank, and Michael Tomasky.9 To reduce their arguments to their essentialist core, these authors argue that the excessive emphasis of the post-New Left on “identity politics” and the new left’s derisive attitude toward the culturally conservative, but economically populist white working class, has denuded the contemporary left of any chance of constructing a majoritarian politics. Rather than defend the particular interests of “the marginal,” the left, in this view, should return to its traditional defense of the “universal” interests of citizens. Thus, universal social democratic programs in favor of job training, health care, and child-care should be put front and center, accompanied by an abandonment of defense of means-tested programs, such as “welfare” and affirmative action. Such means-tested or race-based programs are viewed as dividing the working class and providing few, if any, benefits to working-class and poor people of color. Obviously this work advocates both an expansion of universal forms of social provision, as well as majoritarian strategies for social change. But what these (romantic) advocates of New Deal coalition politics fail to consider is that the racially-exclusionary nature of the New Deal (and of much, but certainly not all,

184 The Future of Democratic Equality of the trade union movement) gave rise to the need for affirmative efforts to end discrimination. In addition, the welfare rights, civil rights, and feminist movement all fought for full employment policies and universal child care and health care policies. But liberal policy elites, succumbing to the resistance of centrist and conservative forces in the 1960s, abandoned a radical extension of universal health care and child care in favor of the means-tested programs of the Great Society that proved so vulnerable to conservative attack. This narrative also seems to assume that feminists should not have defended reproductive rights nor activists of color affirmative action and means-tested social programs. Should these constituencies have waited for a non-existing “majoritarian left” to have protected their interests? Would the world be more attractive (and on the verge of progressive change) if reproductive rights had been further eroded and affirmative action abolished? Absent universal heath care and expanded funding for child care and after school programs (and the continuation of income support for single mothers pursuing higher education or meaningful job training), “welfare reform” worsened the life opportunities of many (certainly not all) poor single mothers and their children. Conservative hostility to public expenditure may fall disproportionately on means-tested programs. But such hostility serves also to preclude the possibility of the very universal programs that those who oppose “the politics of difference” wish to expand. For better or worse, a revitalization of public faith in progressive taxation and democratic public provision cannot “end-run” the racialized hostility to all forms of taxation and public goods created by conservative populism. Thus, the road to a revived social democracy cannot avoid a forthright anti-racist politics. In a multi-racial world, in which identities of gender and race cross-cut those of class, a “universalist” politics cannot avoid issues of “difference,” just as a democratic politics of difference cannot avoid a politics of social solidarity. To criticize all forms of “particular identity” as reactionary and as subversive of “universalism” is to deny the complex and plural nature of American politics and society. The building of a political majority in favor of a public philosophy and public policy of democratic public provision cannot simply be achieved by designing better-engineered social programs. Rather, this political effort must rebuild a vision of solidarity that unites citizens across lines of race, gender, class, and national origin (without denying the realities of social differences). The social programs of the New Deal rested on a sense of common membership and risk (among both white ethnic voters and enfranchised Blacks in the North) fostered by the shared vulnerabilities of the depression and the efforts of the trade union movement. Contemporary moral appeals to a shared economic vulnerability may prove less effective in a more class and racially fragmented post-industrial society. The transformation of hyphenated-American identity into an identity of “whiteness”—an identity hostile to both the non-white poor and to new immigrants—poses a major barrier to this project. On the other hand, a growing number of whites are employed in jobs that do not provide security of employment nor adequate wages and benefits. Thus, the union and social justice movement may be able to forge operative unity across identity lines, as evidenced by the economic justice themes of left-wing populist Democrats.

Conclusion 185 Fear of the end of “the American dream” may help bring to the fore a latent conception of social solidarity embedded in popular support of equality of opportunity, particularly for children. In addition, the revival of the labor movement depends upon successful moral appeals that the exploitation of service and care workers and the return of sweatshop conditions in meat packing, poultry and food processing, and warehouse work violates democratic conceptions of the “work ethic.” The reconstruction of such a politics of solidarity will likely rest upon an intuitive understanding that social rights entail concomitant social obligations to be productive members of society. But a progressive movement needs to redefine the nature of a valued contribution to society. Obviously, the popular devaluing of child-rearing as productive work must be overcome if public provision is not to be structured patriarchally, as are punitive “welfare reform” programs. The living wage movement and efforts to organize low-wage workers is a direct attack on the dominant libertarian ideology that claims that wages are proportionate to productive contribution. The outrageous pay of CEOs blatantly manifests the role of power and politics in the establishment of income differentials. But the “work ethic” remains contested terrain. In the past, the devaluing of the work of child-rearing, care-giving, and public and social service has institutionalized the “work ethic” in a racist and sexist manner. The devaluation of care-giving is evident in the disastrously low-pay and prestige of the work of child care givers, nurse’s aides, hospital orderlies, and public school teachers. Our society proclaims that it wishes to “Leave No Child Left Behind,” but the financial rewards for public school teaching are miniscule as compared to private sector remuneration in jobs that demand comparable levels of educational attainment. It is time for radical democratic theorists to ask communitarian, “poststructuralist,” and “difference” theorists to make clear their political—rather than ontological and metaphysical—commitments. While communitarians are correct to assert that our moral identity is constituted through our common life, a commitment to “rights” can—and has been—institutionalized by democratic, pluralist communities that believe in the moral “good” of democratic participation. While culturally sustaining identities of “difference” contribute to a pluralist democracy, so too does the solidarity derived from a common sense of citizenship. Citizenship need not be a “homogenizing” category that reduces all to the pursuit of the same needs and interests. If our public understanding of “citizenship” fails to embody a non-market conception of human worth then “difference” will not be built on a terrain of democratic equality. “Difference” is not empowering if affluent suburbanites feel no common bonds with residents of the inner city, with the immigrants who care for their children, or with deindustrialized workers experiencing economic and social dislocation. The extreme example of the breakdown of social solidarity in the United States is the absence of any coherent plan to rehabilitate and reintegrate into American society the 2.4 million citizens in jail and prison and another four million on parole or probation. The absence of a public commitment to rebuilding a multiracial, class-diverse New Orleans is another sign of the absence of a popular politics of social solidarity.

186 The Future of Democratic Equality The questions addressed in this book are by no means purely normative or theoretical. Theorists must reflect a pessimism of the intellect by rigorously analyzing present realities. But theorists must also have the optimism of the will to search for the cracks in the dominant power structure. Their work should, upon occasion, remind us of the historical reality that no social order is completely stable or devoid of possibilities for democratic transformation. And it is precisely in times of social crisis that “epochal theory” has contributed to democratic social transformation.10 Thus, this is a work not only in democratic political and social theory, but also in political analysis and prescription. A new majoritarian left will not be reconstructed through anachronistic appeal to a never-realized golden age of leftist solidarity, which in reality excluded women, gays and lesbians, and people of color. But the defense of the rights of marginalized communities cannot succeed absent the revitalization of majoritarian democratic theory and practice. Whether the understanding of social solidarity explored in The Future of Democratic Equality is latent in our atomized and fragmented culture can only be answered through intellectual and political contestation over the meaning of democracy. The outcome of such contestation will determine whether the United States fulfills the promise of “E pluribus Unum”, or becomes even further divided then when the Kerner Commission on racial unrest issued its ominous warnings of a nation divided nearly four decades ago.

Notes

1 Introduction: Bringing “Difference” and “Identity” Back into Concern for Democratic Equality 1 Jeffrey Isaac, “The Strange Silence of Political Theory,” Political Theory 23:4 (November 1995): 636–652. 2 During this period, two of the most cited and influential works that influenced political theorists were Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 3 The “agonal” nature of “anti-foundationalist” politics is stressed in Wendy Brown’s State of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 4 See Special Report, “Inequality in America: The Rich, the Poor and the Growing Gap Between Them,” The Economist, June 15, 2006. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that in the decade of the 1970s, 36 percent of adult sons remained in the same quintile of income earners as their father had occupied, whereas 26 percent moved up or down two quintiles or more, and 38 percent of families moved up or down one quintile of the income ladder. But in the 1990s 40 percent of families stayed in the same quintile, while only 21 percent managed to move up or down two quintiles or more and 39 percent only moved up or down one quintile. The figures for the next decade are likely to reveal an even smaller group of children moving up two quintiles above their parental income level. Thus, social mobility (both up and down) slowed considerably since the 1970s. See Correspondents of the New York Times, Class Matters (New York: Times Books, 2005), p. 13. 5 For paradigmatic examples see Todd Gitlin, Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked By Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1995); Richard Rorty, Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: Howe We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). 6 Among the classic critiques were Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, “The Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review LVII (December, 1962): 947–952; and William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington: Heath, 1974). 7 See Michael Walzer, Obligations; Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970); C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960); and William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse.

188 Notes 8 Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). Pateman critiqued the patriarchal nature of the liberal social contract tradition without abandoning her radical democratic concern for democratizing economic, as well as sexual and cultural, relations. 9 See Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International Perspective,” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 96:2 (2006): 200–205. 10 “Historic Income Tables—Families,” US Census Bureau. June 2007: www.census.gov/ hhes/www/income/histinc/f03.ar.html. 11 See Elisabeth Jacobs, “The Politics of Economic Insecurities,” Issues in Governance Studies 10 (September 2007): 4. www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2007/09 politics_jacobs/jacobs20070913.pdf. 12 See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), pp. 283–284. 13 “Labor Force Participation Rates, 1975–2008,” US Bureau of Labor Statistics. www.bls.gov/opub/working/page3b.htm. 14 Katherine Newman, The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007). 15 Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, Sylvia Allegretto, eds., The State of Working America 2006–07 (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2006), Table 5.1. 16 United States Chamber of Commerce, “National Income and Product Accounts,” Table 2.1. www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=58&First Year=2004&LastYear=2006&Freq=Qtr. 17 Economic Policy Institute, “Snapshots,” January 17, 2007, Table A, www.bea.gov/ national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=58&FirstYear=2004&LastYear=2006& Freq=Qtr. 18 See T.H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” in Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), chpt. 4, pp. 65–122. 19 On the influence of culture, religion, and formal education on working-class voting patterns in advanced democracies, including the United States, see Jeoroen van der Waal, Peter Achterberg, and Dick Houtman, “Class is Not Dead; It Has Been Buried Alive: Class Voting and Cultural Voting in Western Societies 1956–1990,” Politics and Society 35:3 (September 2007): 403–426. 20 For a recent useful review essay of recent studies of class voting in both the South and the nation, see Dan T. Carter, “Is There a South? And Does It Still Matter,” Dissent (Summer 2007): 92–96. 21 See Kathleen Arnold, America’s New Working Class: Race, Gender and Ethnicity in a Biopolitical Age (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); Leonard Feldman, Citizens Without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy and Political Exclusion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); and Keally D. McBride, Collective Dreams: Political Imagination and Community (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). 22 See Benjamin Barber, Con$umed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantalize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007); Amy Gutmann, Identity in Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflection on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1996); Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Ian Shapiro and Michael J. Graetz, Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and William E. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Connolly’s analysis of conservative ideology is fairly compatible with that offered

Notes 189

23 24

25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37

herein, though he gives greater weight to the role of evangelical thought within the conservative world-view. (I would hold that Reagan’s original ideological “framing” relied much more heavily on a populist racial/racist discourse than on a religious one.) Connolly’s prescriptive, operative political and programmatic strategy, as with that of other “radical democratic post-structuralists” differs more in style than in substance from my own. Connolly’s book blurb argues that “Traditional notions of unity or solidarity must be translated into drives to forge provisional assemblages comprised of multiple constituencies and creeds.” Obviously no coalition is permanent and all political action is provisional. See American Political Science Association Task Force Report, “American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality,” Perspectives on Politics 2:4 (December 2004): 651–666. See Robert Kuttner, The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) and Robert Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003). See Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Marcuse, Barrington Moore and Robert Paul Wolff, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) and Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), in passim. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). See William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). See, in passim, Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference; and Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political, not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14:3 (Summer 1985): 223–252. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. See Amy Gutmann, “Communitarian Critics of Liberalism,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14:3 (Summer 1985): 308–322. On deliberative democracy see Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); for a work in the tradition of Jurgen Habermas’s “communicative ethics” that takes into account “gender and difference,” see Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992); for recent work in “global justice,” see Carol Gould, Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). For contemporary work on participatory democracy that comprehends the relationship between just economic distribution and democratic participation see the work of Erik Olin Wright’s “real utopias project,” particularly the essays by Erik Olin Wright, Archon Fung, and Joshua Cohen in Fung and Wright, eds., Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Democracy (New York: Verso Press, 2003). Unfortunately, this applied theoretical work is read more by sociologists than political theorists. See Lynn M. Sanders, “Against Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory 25:6 (November 1997): 347–376. See Benhabib, Situating the Self; Fraser, Justice Interruptus; Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference; and Jodi Dean, Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism After Identity Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Karl Marx, “The Critique of the Gotha Programme” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx–Engels Reader, 2nd edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), p. 530. Joan W. Scott, “Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference, Or the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Feminist Studies 14:1 (Spring 1988): 33–50.

190 Notes 38 See Anne Phillips, Democracy and Difference (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993). 39 Ian Shapiro, “Problems, Methods, and Theories in the Study of Politics, Or What’s Wrong with Political Science and What to Do About It,” Political Theory 30:4 (August 2002): 596–619. 40 See, for example, Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 41 See Joseph M. Schwartz, The Permanence of the Political: A Democratic Critique of the Radical Impulse to Transcend Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 42 See James Morone, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 43 See Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference and Susan Hekman, Private Selves, Public Identities: Reconsidering Identity Politics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). 44 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. 45 See Wendy Brown, States of Injury. 46 See Seyla Benhabib, Chapter 1, in Judith Butler, Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge Press, 1995). 47 James Glass, Shattered Selves: Multiple Personalities in a Postmodern World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 48 Terry Eagleton, After Theory. 49 See Jeff Faux, The Global Class War (New York: Wiley, 2006), esp. pp. 126–144 and Dani Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1997) for estimates that trade and outsourcing may be the cause of about 20 percent of the post-1973 stagnation in workers’ wages, while deunionization may have had an equally powerful impact on wage stagnation. 50 See Linda Weiss, ed., States in the Global Economy: Bringing Domestic Institutions Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Duane Shank, Global Capital, Political Institutions, and Policy Change in Developed Welfare States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Peter Hall and David Soskice, eds., Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 51 See Jacob Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health care and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 52 See Jonas Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 160–170 and John D. Stephens and Evelyne Huber, Development and the Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Policies in Global Markets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 218–230. 53 See Jonas Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity, pp. 58–62. 54 Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005). 55 For arguments that progressives should favor universal social programs rather than means-tested ones, see William Julius Wilson, The Bridge over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) and Thedsa Skocpol, The Missing Middle: Working Families and the Future of American Social Policy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000). 56 Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). Frank argues that the Democrats could increase their popular support if they ran an unabashed populist campaign, aimed at restoring progressive taxation and government regulation of corporate abuses. He underestimates, I believe, the public

Notes 191 suspicion—shared by many whites of moderate means—that “tax reform” is rarely progressive (i.e. it usually hurts lower income individuals) and that the public sector is inefficient and rewards the indolent. These attitudes, in part, result from the right focusing attention on means-tested programs that are not available to working-class families who earn just enough to fail to qualify (for public health insurance or child care subsidies, which is what TANF serves as for single parent mothers). Through this “framing,” the right has succeeded in devaluing in the popular imagination functions the state does well (e.g. at the federal level, Medicare, Social Security and other forms of income support and at the state and local level, the high-quality public schools and public amenities of affluent suburbs). The role of public provision is so undervalued and unexplained by American political elites that few citizens understand that wellfunded public infrastructure (e.g. sewage and sanitation) and public health are necessary for a healthy and productive society. 2 From Domestic to Global Solidarity 1 See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Mercenary Army (New York: Nation Books, 2007). 2 See Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New York: New York University, 1972). 3 See Clause Offe, The Contradictions of the Welfare State, ed. John Keane (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984). 4 See Katherine Newman and Victor Tan Chen, The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007). 5 Two useful analyses of the rise of global neo-liberalism are Jeff Faux, The Global Class War (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2006) and Robert Kuttner, Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). 6 On the tension between the role of individuals as “consumers” versus “citizens,” see Benjamin Barber, Con$umed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantalize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007) and Robert Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). 7 See Carol Gould, Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chpt. 6, “Conceptualizing Women’s Human Rights”; Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), chpt. 7, “Women, Welfare and the Politics of Need Interpretation”; and Anne Phillips, Democracy and Difference (University Park: The Penn State University Press, 1993), chpt. 1, “Fraternity.” 8 See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). Putnam’s guesstimate that only 10 percent of the decline in civic participation is due to the time burdens involved in the emergence of the two working parent family may well underestimate how growing inequality and longer family work-time precludes greater civic involvement. Of course, Putnam’s claim that 50 percent of the decline in participation is due to subsequent generations having less of a “civic ethic” than the post-World War II “greatest generation” is hard to isolate as an independent causal variable. That is, why are generations of adults after the affluent 1960s less civically involved? 9 See, among other works, Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Malden: Polity, 2002); Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Border: A Global Political Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); KokChor Tan, Justice without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Patriotism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Gould, Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights. In addition, Nancy Fraser and (posthumously) Iris Marion Young are coming out with books on global justice. For one of the first efforts by a theorist to

192 Notes

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

address these issues in a mass-market oriented work, see Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1995). See Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), particularly chpt. 9, “Solidarity,” 189–198. See Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) and Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). See Richard Miller, “Cosmopolitan Respect and Patriotic Concern,” in Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, eds., The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 133. For a recent, balanced evaluation of cutbacks in various European welfare states see Jonas Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe Versus Liberal America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, chpt. 3, “The Contingency of a Liberal Community.” Norman Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty (London: New Left Books, 1995), chpt. 1, “Richard Rorty and the Righteous Among the Nations.” Amy Gutmann, Identity in Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 35–37. Timothy Brennan makes a similar point by means of a dense post-Marxist critique of the limits of post-structuralist political theory. He holds that a shared political value can constitute a form of identity and community. See Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). See Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006) and Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), esp. chpt. 8, “Multiculturalism and Freedom.” Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), chpt. 3, “Security and Welfare” and Michael Walzer, “Politics in the Welfare State,” in Howe, Irving, ed., Essential Works of Socialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 454–479. See Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 37–51, 66–71. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, pp. 84–90. Rorty rests his “contingent” ethics on a seeming universal human aversion to suffering and humiliation. See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 189–198. See Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Charles Taylor, “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” in Nancy L. Rosenblum ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 159–182. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, esp. chpt. 1, “Displacing the Distributive Paradigm.” James Morone, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). See Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), esp. chpt. 8, “Liberalism and the Keynesian Revolution,” pp. 250–273. For this critique of Sandel see Amy Gutmann, “Communitarian Critics of Liberalism,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14:3 (Summer 1985): 308–322. For paradigmatic works see Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); and William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

Notes 193 29 Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, chpt. 3, “Democracy, Equality, Normality,” pp. 75–104. 30 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), esp. chpt. 2, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” pp. 19–49 and chpt. 5, “Precarious Life,” pp. 128–151. 31 See Anna Shola Orloff, “The Political Origins of America’s Belated Welfare State,” in Anna Shola Orloff, Theda Skocpol, and Margaret Weir, eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 32 See Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: the Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 33 See Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981). 34 See Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 35 For the classic statement of this view see Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1995). For the most thorough empirical and historical exploration of the factors behind “American exceptionalism” see Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Did Not Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2000). The major problem with the work is its failure to examine the role racism played in preventing a coherent social democratic and labor politics from developing in the United States. 36 See William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 37 E.P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class explores the role artisanal senses of fraternity and communal self-sufficiency played in the origins of working-class solidarity. 38 See Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2005). 39 Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). 40 Political sociologists often use the term “Fordist” to indicate the type of political economy characteristic of the industrial welfare state. Henry Ford believed that his auto workers should be paid sufficiently high wages so that they could afford to purchase the cars they produced. Thus, the floor under consumption created by the “social compact” of relatively high wages and social insurance of the 1947–1973 postWorld War II era in advanced industrial states is often referred to as the “Fordist” mode of production and accumulation. 41 See William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears (New York: Knopf, 1996). 42 I develop the argument that follows in the next two paragraphs further in Chpts 5 and 6 of this work. 43 Nearly twenty years ago Thomas and Mary Byrne Edsall analyzed how Ronald Reagan used white working-class resentment toward affirmative action and means-tested social welfare programs to hive off sufficient “Reagan Democrats” (white workers who traditionally voted Democratic) to construct a new Republican presidential majority. See Thomas and Mary Byrne Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1991). 44 Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity provides the most up-to-date and balanced evaluation of the evidence. In particular, see chpt. 8, “Welfare States in Retrenchment,” pp. 182–203. 45 For clear ethnographic evidence that the lives of low-wage single-parent working mothers with children are not qualitatively better (for them or their children) than single mothers not in the formal labor market (who almost invariably must subsidize inadequate TANF with work-off-the-books), see Kathryn Edin, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997).

194 Notes 46 Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993). 47 Lydia Polgreen, “War’s Chaos Steals Congo’s Young by the Millions,” New York Times, July 30, 2006. 48 Luis Inacio da Silva, “Speech at the Plenary Meeting of the 61st UN General Assembly,” New York, September 19, 2006. www.brazil.org.uk/newsandmedia/sp20060919. html. 49 For a rigorous outline of a democratic politics of “multiculturalism,” see Gould, Globalizing Democracy, esp. chpt. 5, “Cultural Identity, Group Rights, and Social Ontology” and chpt. 6, “Conceptualizing Women’s Human Rights.” 50 See Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002); George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered (New York: Public Affairs, 1998); and Felix Rohatyn’s numerous recent essays over the past decade in The New York Review of Books. 3 Post-Structuralist Political Theory: Living in an Unreal World— Where’s You? Me? Agency? 1 APSA Task Force Report, “American Democracy in An Age of Inequality,” Perspectives on Politics 2:4 (December 2004): 651–666. 2 For the canonical work on “différance,” see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, transl. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1976). 3 See, for example, Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). 4 On “performativity,” see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge Press, 1990), pp. 88–89, 136–147; and Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 10, 45. 5 See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 6 On “governmentality” and the “productive” capacity of “discourse” see Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Essential Foucault, eds. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: New Press, 2004), pp. 229–245 and also Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in The Essential Foucault, p. 307. 7 For the by-now canonical critique of teleological and structuralist theories of “true consciousness,” see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). 8 See Hekman, Private Selves, Public Identities, p. 11. 9 See Brown, States of Injury, pp. 4, 39. 10 See Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics. 11 James M. Glass, Shattered Selves: Multiple Personalities in a Postmodern World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 12 On the role “rights” play in norming behavior, see Wendy Brown, States of Injury, pp. 98–100. 13 See Susan Bickford’s effort to defend the efforts of social movements to “communicate” a sense of identity that avoids false “homogenization” or exclusion of difference. Bickford is particularly useful in highlighting the theoretical efforts of feminists and lesbians of color, such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Audre Lourde, to both construct shared communal narratives that affirm difference while also developing bonds of solidarity among people who have shared similar experiences of exclusion. See Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), esp. chpt. 4, “The Genuine Conditions of Our Lives,” pp. 96–139. 14 For the critique of identity politics that these theorists of group empowerment criticize, see Wendy Brown, State of Injuries, p. 55. Nancy Hartsock expresses concern about deleterious aspects of post-structuralist analysis for feminist political practice in Nancy Hartsock, “Femininist Theory and Practice,” Signs 21:4, 1996. See also Hart-

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sock, “Postmodernism and Political Change: Issues for Feminist Theory,” Cultural Critique 14 (Winter 1990). While her work draws upon post-structuralist themes, Patricia Williams takes issue with some aspects of the post-structuralist and “critical race theorists” dismissal of “rights” as disempowering in “Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights,” 22 Harvard Civil Liberties Review, 401. See Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’ ” in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), esp. chpts. 3 and 4 in regard to “performativity” and “resistance”; and William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). See Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy, (New York: Basic Books,1999). For a similar critique of the anti-political and anti-liberal impulses of radical utopianism from the perspective of a left democratic theorist who would not describe himself as a post-structuralist, see Joseph M. Schwartz, The Permanence of the Political. This is a major theme of Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992). Connolly, Ethos of Pluralism, pp. 36–41; and Brown, States of Injury, pp. 45–51. See Susan Hekman, Private Selves, Public Identities, esp. pp. 38–58. See Susan Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Martha Minow, Making All the Difference: Exclusion, Inclusion, and the Law (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957) and Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). See Deiter Reuschemeyer, Evelyn Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (New York: Blackwell, 1989) and Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism (New York: St. Martin’s 1990). The by-now canonical texts in question include Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translts. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1984); and Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). On aesthetic modernism’s similarities with postmodernism see Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), esp. chpt. 2, “Modernism and Capitalism,” pp. 29–61. On Nietzsche and Heidigger as having prefigured much of what postmodernists wish to discuss see Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), particularly, “Self-creation and Affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche, Heidigger,” pp. 96–121 and “From Ironist Theorist to Private Allusions: Derrida,” pp. 122–137. This reading owes much to David Harvey, The Postmodern Condition and Spaces of Capital; and to Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism. See Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, p. 476, in Robert W. Tucker, ed., The Marx–Engels Reader, 2nd edition (New York: Norton, 1978).

196 Notes 30 See Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). 31 See Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1988). 32 David Harvey, The Postmodern Condition, p. 107. 33 See Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1989) and JeanFrancois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. 34 For a version of this insight, see David Harvey, The Postmodern Condition, pp. 44–50. 35 See Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” pp. 32–50; and “Polemics, Politics and Problematizations,” pp. 381–390 in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984). One can also see this tendency to embrace conscious subjectivity in his afterword, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edition, eds., Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 208–226. 36 See Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’ ” in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); and William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 37 For representative critiques of Rawls by post-structuralist-influenced theorists, see Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) and Brown, States of Injury, pp. 58–59. 38 See Brown, States of Injury, chpt. 4, “The Mirror of Pornography,” pp. 77–95. 39 For Brown’s post-Arendtian, post-Nietzschean conception of identity, see in particular in States of Injury, chpt. 2, “Postmodern Exposures, Feminist Hesitations,” pp. 30–51. 40 See my comments on Roberto Ungar’s similar celebration (with his endorsement of a radical “politics of plasticity”) of the protean nature of human identity in Joseph M. Schwartz, The Permanence of the Political, pp. 18–19. 41 For expressions of these views see Brown, States of Injury, p. 37 and Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralism, pp. 99–101. 42 See “Exchange: Left Conservatism,” The Nation, May 11, 1998, pp. 2, 59–60. 43 See Butler, “For a Careful Reading,” in Feminist Contentions, pp. 47–51. 44 Brown calls for an “amoral” agonal politics to liberation in States of Injury, p. 45. 45 See Sheldon Wolin, “Machiavelli: The Politics and the Economy of Violence,” Chapter 7 in Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), pp. 195–238. 46 Butler, Feminist Contentions, p. 45. 47 Butler, Feminist Contentions, p. 46. 48 Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy, p. 112. 49 Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy, p. 116. 50 See Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). Walzer’s more political, less metaphysical position, allows him to engage in firstorder political argument. Walzer is less clear about how his method allows one to adjudicate among conflicting claims within a culture and to “situate” the role of the social critic in exile from regimes that do not tolerate social criticism. 51 This is the major political problem with Butler’s analysis of “resignification” in Gender Troubles, pp. 88–89. Nancy Fraser makes a similar point to my own in Feminist Contentions, pp. 67–70. 52 Butler’s politics of parodying and rejecting expected “performative” (or “self-

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inscribed”) norms of gender and sexuality is outlined in Gender Trouble, pp. 136–147 and Bodies That Matter, pp. 10, 45. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), esp. chpt. 4, “The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and the Risks of Public Critique,” pp. 101–128. Butler, Feminist Contentions, p. 48. See Leslie Thiel, “Review of Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics,” American Political Science Review 88:1 (March 1994): 214–215; Fraser, Feminist Contentions, pp. 71–72; and Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, pp. 165–167. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1984). Nancy Fraser, in Feminist Contentions, chpt. 3, “False Antithesis: A Response to Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler,” esp. pp. 66–71; Susan Hekman, Private Selves, Public Identities, esp. chpt. 1, “Constructing Identity,” pp. 1–37; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), in passim. On Focault’s concept of “capillaries of power” that create the self, see Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Essential Foucault, eds. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: New Press, 2004), pp. 229–245 and also Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in The Essential Foucault, p. 307. For the possibility of resistance to such power see the above and Foucault, “The Ethic of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Paul Rabinow, ed., Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 292. For Foucault’s concept of the crafting of the soul and body, a “working of the self” that can escape the bind of the “production of the self” by power/knowledge discourses, see Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Vol. II, The History of Sexuality, transl. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1985), pp. 80–82, 88–91 and Foucault, The Care of the Self: Vol. III, The History of Sexuality (New York: Random House, 1986), pp. 45–46, 56–58. Butler, Gender Troubles, pp. 88–89 and Bodies that Matter, pp. 10, 45, 136–147. Susan Hekman, Private Selves, Political Identities, p. 128. Hekman, Private Selves, Political Identities, pp. 5–8. Hekman offers her view that the “core self” is set after childhood in Private Selves, Political Identities, p. 29. Unless we trivialize or tautologize “discourse” to mean all institutional life, as language partially constitutes all human practices. But this move, at times endorsed by post-structuralist theorists, opens the very door to macro-structural, realist, and materialist forms of social analysis which they otherwise claim to abjure. Brown, States of Injury, p. 45. See Brown, States of Injury, pp. 170–171. Brown warns of the negative aspects of rights-based “gains” in States of Injury, chpt. 5, “Rights and Losses,” pp. 96–134. Brown, States of Injury, p. 134. Patricia Williams, “Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights,” 22 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Review 401. Brown, States of Injury, p. 174. See Joseph Schwartz, review of William E. Connolly, “The Ethos of Pluralization,” Journal of Politics 59:2 (May 1997): 616–618. See Connolly’s critique of pluralism’s inattentiveness to structural inequalities of wealth and power in William E. Connolly, ed., The Biases of Pluralism (New York: Atherton Press, 1969) and The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington: Heath, 1974). For Connolly’s discussion of the repressive nature of “normalization” in liberal pluralist democracies, see the section “Democracy and Normalization,” in The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 85–93.

198 Notes 74 Connolly outlines this “ethos of critical responsiveness,” in the section, “Justice and Critical Responsiveness,” in The Ethos of Pluralization, pp. 178–188. 75 See William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 76 Connolly, “Democracy, Equality, Normality,” in The Ethos of Pluralization, pp. 75–104. 77 See Stanley Aronowitz, “Postmodernism and Politics,” in Andrew Ross, ed., Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 46–62. 78 Several feminist theorists, including Nancy Fraser, have made this criticism of Butler. See Fraser, “False Antitheses: A Response to Seyla Benhabib and Judith Butler,” in Fraser, Justice Interruptus, p. 223, n.28. 79 The latter half of this sentence’s brief definition of democracy consciously mirrors Brown’s only explicit definition of freedom and “the emancipatory democratic project” in States of Injury, p. 7. 80 See Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy, pp. 112, 116, 118. 4 Can a “Politics of Difference” (or “Identity Politics”) Ground a Radical Democratic Conception of Justice? 1 As examples of post-structuralist influenced works that critique essentialist conceptions of group identity, but which also affirm that groups (with diverse members) can construct shared political positions via dialogue and political discussion, see Shane Phelan, Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989) and Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Press, 1987). 2 Such identities are often transformed by historical circumstance; for example, in the United States many second and third generation Latinos and Asian-Americans have constructed pan-ethnic identities that unite them around the similar forms of linguistic and cultural exclusion that they have experienced navigating a hegemonically white and English-speaking culture. These pan-Hispanic or pan-Asian identities are radically distinct from the nationally-based identities persistent in East and Southeast Asia or in Latin America and the Caribbean. These ethnic and nationally-specific identities persist among and across pan-ethnic identities in the United States, particularly, but not exclusively, among first generation and working-class Latinos and Asian immigrants. (That is, pan-Asian and “Latino” identities are more to be found among college educated and/or politically active second-generation immigrants.) 3 See Robin Kelly, “Identity Politics and Class Struggle,” New Politics 22 (Winter 1997): 84–96. 4 See Todd Gitlin, Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1995); Michael Tomasky, Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America (New York: Free Press, 1996); Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1995). More recent works in this genre are Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006) and Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Holt Publishers, 2005). Both books provide the useful service of demonstrating how neo-liberal Democratic leaders focus upon winning over “independent” suburban white voters led the party to downplay issues of class inequality in favor of “social issues” such as reproductive rights. But both authors’ belief that a populist politics that redressed class inequality would vault the Democrats into national majority status radically underestimates how the right has utilized racial politics to paint all government programs as creators of dependency.

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Without frontally attacking the right’s use of racial politics to devalue progressive taxation and social provision, any left redistributive project is likely to fail. That is, a social democratic politics in the United States cannot be race-neutral, but must be anti-racist. See Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). For one of the first analyses of the right’s use of hostility toward means-tested social welfare programs to transform white working- and middle-class voters attitudes toward taxes and public spending in general, see Thomas and Mary Byrne Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). See Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference and Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For Young’s critique of liberal, impartial conceptions of justice, see Justice and the Politics of Difference chpt. 4, “The Ideal of Impartiality and the Civic Public,” pp. 96–121. For Susan Hekman’s critique of Rawls’s, Nussbaum’s and Okin’s conceptions of fairness and justice, see Private Selves, Public Identities, pp. 47–58. Hekman’s argument that a true “politics of identity” must reject all liberal notions of impartiality and uniform standards of justice is made most explicitly in Private Selves, Public Identities, chpt. 2, “Identity and the Liberal Polity,” pp. 37–80. For Young’s critique of Rawlsian conceptions of justice as focusing inordinately on economic distribution at the expense of democratic voice, see Justice and the Politics of Difference, chpt. 1, “Displacing the Distributive Paradigm,” in, pp. 15–38. Young explores the different faces of oppression in Justice and the Politics of Difference, chpt. 2, “The Five Faces of Oppression,” pp. 39–65. For Young’s conception of democratic pluralist justice as embodied in the practices of a just, heterogenous city, see Justice and the Politics of Difference, chpt. 8, “City Life and Difference,” pp. 226–256. For Young’s conception of group identity, see Justice and the Politics of Difference, pp. 42–47. For Young’s use of Sartre’s concept of “seriality,” see Iris Marion Young, “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective,” Signs 19:3 (Spring 1994): 713–738. See Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). See, in passim, Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). This argument is central to Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992). Benhabib makes this point out of a desire to merge her feminist concern for difference with her more Habermasian and socialist concern for universal social justice. Nancy Fraser’s overall work shares these concerns, as does mine. See also Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997). On the struggle against homophobia within the African-American church see Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Cornel West and bell hooks, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (Boston: South End Press, 1991). See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); and Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999). One can debate whether or not these distinct liberal theories of justice are sufficiently sensitive to the divergent needs of particular communities or are adequately concerned with a democratic distribution of power, and not solely with the equitable distribution of resources necessary for the equal ability of individuals to fulfill their capabilities or life plans. But anyone who considers

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themselves a radical democratic pluralist must be concerned with the values of both diversity and social justice. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 87–92. Young argues for special representation for oppressed groups in Justice and the Politics of Difference, pp. 184–191. Young calls for “group veto power regarding specific policies that affect a group directly, such as reproductive rights for women, or land use policy for Indian reservations.” See Justice and the Politics of Difference, pp. 184. She does not discuss how a radical democratic polity should adjudicate claims by two or more groups that a policy has a conflicting effect—one positive, one negative—on one or another group. Nor does she explore how a democratic polity would designate (and reach consensus upon) groups as “historically oppressed.” Several times when discussing the feeling of alienation from mainstream white American culture that (some) Blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans and Arab-Americans experience, Young also mentions Jews. See Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, in passim, pp. 64, 160, 162. While undoubtedly many Jews experience—as do Muslims and atheists—some alienation from a predominantly Christian public discourse, it would be hard to argue that in the twenty-first-century United States, Jewish-Americans are as systematically excluded from positions of power and influence than are many other minority groups. Amartya Sen rests his defense of a universal (and cross-cultural) conception of freedom and justice upon the social reality that “differences” exist within any given particular community. Sen argues that rigid conceptions of group identity and of group representation negate the reality that ethical, moral, and political differences exist within any identifiable “particular” community—and that individuals, if they are to be truly free, must be able to exercise choice within such groups. Sen terms this pluralist reality “divergent diversity” and warns against conceptions of ethnic representational politics that attempt to homogenize “particular” communities. This is the major theme of his most recent book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). One might illustrate Sen’s point in regard to United States ethnic and cultural politics—even a bare knowledge of Latino politics in the United States reveals that in New York City Puerto Rican and Dominican communities have not been natural political allies. And in Chicago, the only major city with relatively equal numbers of Chicanos and Puerto Ricans (communities representing about 12 percent of the city’s population each), their respective political leaders have often found themselves on opposite sides of the Chicago political fence. Obviously, many Spanish-speaking immigrants share the experience of insecure residence status and linguistic and cultural discrimination. They also often share an interest in democratic immigration and naturalization policies and many (not all) embrace policies that would facilitate the preservation of their language and culture within a dominant Anglo culture. And most have experienced colonialist and imperialist degradation of their cultures and the economies of their nations of origin (and Puerto Ricans and Chicano communities in the Southwest experienced United States colonialism and theft of native lands). But this does not mean that there are no significant class, political, national, and religious differences among and across “Latino” communities.

24 Gutmann, Identity and Democracy, pp. 145–150. 25 Will Kymlicka justifies (relative) autonomy for indigenous groups in liberal democracies because these groups have been previously excluded from a democratic right to nurture cultural membership. But he also argues that the democratic state may ban anti-liberal practices by such groups. See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 26 See Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy, pp. 105–108. 27 See Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 139–150.

Notes 201 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

37

38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46

47 48

See Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 115–120. Hekman, Private Selves, Public Lives, pp. 96. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 147–150. See Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 108–121. See Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1994). Anne Phillips expresses this concern in Democracy and Difference (University Park: Penn State University Press), chpt. 8, “Pluralism, Solidarity, and Change,” pp. 139–165. See Phillips, Democracy and Difference, p. 155. Both Anne Phillips and Iris Marion Young (in Inclusion and Democracy) endorse efforts by progressive political parties to insure that a certain percentage of candidates are women and ethnic and racial minorities. But these candidates are not to view themselves solely as “representing” their particular identity group; rather, they are to serve as representatives of a broad-based political party. See Phillips, Democracy and Difference, p. 155 and Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 150, 152. In proportional representation systems, the number of legislators chosen from the multi-district constituency (which can be regional or national) is proportional to the vote received. So a higher-ranking on the party list of candidates increases one’s chances of serving in the legislature. Parties that value class, racial, and gender diversity can insure that the top of their candidate lists include representatives drawn from historically under-represented groups. See Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. 167–172 and Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 14. Gutmann insightfully contends that advocates of “identity politics” do not readily recognize the group identity constituted by individuals who share the same normative and political convictions. See Gutmann, Identity and Democracy, pp. 144–150. For Hekman’s citing of Wisconsin v. Yoder as a possible positive model of the defense of difference, see Private Selves, Public Identities, pp. 79–80. Gutmann, Identity and Democracy, pp. 59–64, 86–95. See Avishai Margalit and Moshe Hallberthal, “Liberalism and the Right to Culture,” Social Research 61:3 (1994): 491, 493. They contend that the liberal democratic state should tolerate—even subsidize—illiberal cultures that provide meaning to their members, as long as their members have a free right to exit such associations. Gutmann queries whether adults who have been educated within illiberal educational institutions controlled by these groups will have the self-reflective capacity to “choose” to exit groups that are rather hermetically sealed off from external liberal influences. See Susan Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). See Shalom Lappin, “Multiculturalism and Democracy,” Dissent (Summer 2007): 14–18. See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 163–170. Benhabib, Claims of Culture, chpt. 5, “Deliberative Democracy and Multicultural Dilemmas.” For Young’s explicit defense of affirmative action as “reverse discrimination” and an effort to insure that “arbitrarily” distributed scarce positions are proportionally allocated, see her Justice and the Politics of Difference, chpt. 7, “Affirmative Action and the Myth of Merit,” pp. 192–225. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 198. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, for definition of “oppression,” p. 38. For why and how affirmative action should fight oppression, and not just discrimination, see pp. 195–204.

202 Notes 49 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, p. 212. 50 Young outlines her “ideal city” of (empathetic?) strangers in Justice and the Politics of Difference, chpt. 8, “City Life and Difference,” pp. 226–256. 51 See Hekman, Private Selves, Public Identities, pp. 78, 80. 52 Hekman, Private Selves, Public Identities, p. 78. 53 Hekman, Private Selves, Public Identities, pp. 37, 55. 54 Jodi Dean is another feminist theorist who takes both “difference” and “solidarity” seriously. She develops a conception of empathetic “reflective solidarity” that explores how communication with others facilitates identification across differences. See Jodi Dean, Solidarity of Strangers: Feminist After Identity Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 55 Hekman, Private Selves, Public Identities, p. 79. 56 See Martha Minow, Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and the American Law (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 57 See Minow, Making All the Difference, p. 382. 58 Phillips, Democracy and Difference, p. 44. 59 Zillah Eisenstein, The Female Body and the Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 77. 60 Karl Marx, “The Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Richard Tucker, ed., The Marx–Engels Reader, 2nd edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), p. 531. 61 See Hekman, Private Selves, Public Identities, pp. 78–79. 62 Hekman, Private Selves, Public Identities, p. 79. 63 See Hekman on coalition politics, Private Selves, Public Identities, pp. 144–145; on utilizing a politics of difference to achieve “equality and justice for all,” see Hekman, Private Selves, Public Identities, p. 148. 64 Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 19–20. 65 Robin Leidner, “Stretching the Boundaries of Liberalism: Democratic Innovation in a Feminist Organization,” Signs 16:2 (1991). 66 Nancy Fraser analyzes the tensions between a “politics of recognition” aimed at incorporating marginal groups into mainstream institutions and a “politics of redistribution” in “From Redistribution to Recognition: Dilemmas of Justice in Post-Socialist Age,” New Left Review 212 (July–August 1995): 68–93. In that article she also distinguishes between “affirmative” reforms of both recognition and redistribution which ameliorate injustices without transforming basic social structures and “transformative” reforms which democratize class, gender, and race relations (in all these cases by “deconstructing” or lessening in import these forms of identity). 67 See Iris Marion Young, “Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Dual Systems Theory,” New Left Review 222 (March/April 1997): 147–160. 68 William Julius Wilson made the argument that affirmative action mostly advantaged African-Americans who already had considerable educational and cultural capital as early as in The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 69 See Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition,” New Left Review 212 (July–August 1995). 70 Anne Phillips attempts to reconcile the positions of Fraser and Young in “From Inequality to Difference: A Severe Case of Displacement?” New Left Review 224 (July–August 1997): 143–153. 71 See Ronald Dworkin, “Hard Cases,” in Taking Right Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 81–130.

Notes 203 5 The Rise of Global “Casino Capitalism”: Short-Term Financial Profit Versus Long-Term Equitable Growth 1 The view that advanced industrial economies must be lean and flexible has been widely publicized by Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). See also Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Malden: Polity Press, 1999) and Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives (New York: Routledge, 2000). Popular left-wing analyses of globalization that are pessimistic about the possibility of a “high-road,” “high-wage” egalitarian model for global competitiveness on the part of traditional welfare states include Jeff Faux, The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future—and What It Will Take to Win it Back (New York: John Wiley and Sons), 2006 and William Greider, One World Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 2 See Carol Gould, Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Kathryn Sikkink and Margaret E. Keck, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Norton, 1995), esp. “A Global Civil Society?” pp. 276–293. 3 For an analysis of Enron’s collapse as a result of the Anglo-American, deregulatory version of capitalism see Felix Rohatyn, “The Betrayal of Capitalism,” New York Review of Books (February 28, 2002): 6–8. 4 This trend is noted in David Gordon Fat and Mean, (New York: Martin Kessler Books, 1996). 5 For two brief (and rather rare) systemic analyses of the Enron debacle, see Robert Kuttner, “The Road to Enron,” The American Prospect, March 25, 2002, pp. 2–3 and William Greider, “Enron’s Rise and Fall,” The Nation (December 24, 2001), pp. 5–6. 6 John Maynard Keynes’ classic argument about the inherently speculative nature of financial markets and the need for state regulation thereof is made in The General Theory of Employment and Investment (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936). 7 For feasible alternatives of regulatory capitalism to neo-liberal deregulation see the special issue of The American Prospect, “Enron Capitalism and How to Fix It,” March 25, 2002, as well as Robin Blackburn, “Enron and the Pension Crisis,” New Left Review (March–April 2002). 8 For the Bernanke quote, see Nelson D. Schwartz, “One World, Taking Risks Together,” The New York Times, “Week in Review,” October 21, 2007, p. 3. 9 On the savings and loan debacle, see William Greider, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 60–72. 10 See Robin Blackburn on the relationship between the Long-Term Investment Capital bail-out and the Enron crisis, “The Enron Debacle and the Pension Crisis,” New Left Review (March–April 2002): 26, 30–33. 11 On the workings of Enron’s derivatives markets and their off-shore companies, see Jeff Madrik, “Enron: Seduction and Betrayal,” New York Review of Books (March 14, 2002): 21. 12 For feasible alternatives of regulatory capitalism to neo-liberal deregulation see the special issue of The American Prospect, “Enron Capitalism and How to Fix It,” March 25, 2002, as well as Blackburn, “Enron and the Pension Crisis,” New Left Review, op. cit. 13 Parts of this first section are drawn from the author’s essay, “The Enron Debacle: Casino Capitalism and Lemon Socialism,” Dissent (Summer 2002): 5–7. 14 For representative works of “the regulatory school” see Michael Aglietta, “Capitalism at the Turn of the Century: Regulation Theory and the Challenge of Social Change,” New Left Review 232 (1998): 41–90 and Michael Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (London: New Left Books, 1978). See also Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles: The Crisis of Global Fordism (London: Verso, 1987).

204 Notes 15 Named for Henry Ford’s recognition in 1920 that paying his workers’ higher wages (at that time, $5 a day!) would allow his workers to purchase the very Model T that they produced. 16 For the most provocative arguments that “globalization” and “post-Fordism” is not so new or significant, see Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990) and Doug Henwood, A New Economy? (New York: Verso, 2000). 17 For an analysis of the politics and economics of this “three speed society,” see my “Coalition Politics in a Three Speed Society,” Socialist Review 90:2 (April–June 1990): 67–79. 18 Stuart Hall introduced the term “conservative modernization” in his writings in the “new times” debate analyzing the rise of post-Fordist, Thatcherite politics in the British journal Marxism Today. For a summary version of his analysis of the hegemonic project of the right see Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988), esp. chpt. 1. 19 For a balanced analysis of the persistence of stronger welfare states in Europe, but the constraints placed upon them by the hyper-mobility of financial capital see Paul Pierson, ed., The New Politics of the Welfare State, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 20 For the manner in which mobile finance capital hampers the social democratic project see Evelyne Huber Stephens and John Stephens, “Internationalization and the Social Democratic Model: Crisis and Future Prospects,” Comparative Political Studies 31:3 (1998): 353–397; and Stephens and Stephens, “Globalisation, Competitiveness, and the Social Democratic Model,” Social Policy and Society 1:1 (2002): 47–57. 21 The resulting mass movements against neo-liberalization have given rise to a wave of left governments across Latin America. But those in the more industrialized nations of Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil, while redistributing somewhat to the poor, have been fiscally quite moderate. The indigenous-based lefts of Bolivia and Ecuador are tentatively exploring more ambitious national development strategies, but these much poorer nations remain dependent on exploiting extractive resources. The populist rule of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela is often cited as an alternative to the neo-liberal consensus, but absent the global rise in oil prices, the ability of this regime to transfer income to the poor would be greatly limited. 22 See William Greider, One World Ready or Not (New York: Simon and Schuster, New York, 1997), chpt. 14, “These Dark Satanic Mills,” pp. 334–359 on downward pressures on labor costs and rising inequality within the global economy. 23 For a succinct treatment of the vulnerability to United States (and global) economic prosperity posed by the massive United States trade deficit see Eamonn Fingleton, “Unsustainable,” The American Prospect (August 14, 2000): 18–21. 24 See Henwood, A New Economy?, op. cit. 25 See V.I. Lenin’s, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers), 1936. 26 See Linda Weiss, The Myth of the Powerless State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998) on Japanese investment in ASEAN nations. 27 See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954). This classic study of the role of the state (and brutal state force) in the development of “free labor markets” in nineteenth-century England should be required reading for anyone who believes that laissez-faire capitalism has ever existed. Polanyi also illustrates how working-class resistance to unregulated markets is central to the development of democracy. 28 For the best popular description of this conscious United States foreign economic policy see Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002). 29 See Dana Frank, “Our Fruit, Their Labor, and Global Reality,” Washington Post, June 2, 2002. 30 For a brief introduction to global intellectual property fights see David Evans, “Who

Notes 205

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32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Owns Ideas? The War Over Global Intellectual Property,” Foreign Affairs, November/ December 2002. China, Malaysia, and India all weathered the East Asian crisis of 1997 because they maintained capital controls, contrary to the policy advice of the IMF. See Robert Wade and Frank Veneroso, “The Gathering World Slump and the Battle over Capital Controls,” New Left Review (September–October 1998): 18–42. For the most influential paen to the glories of globalization see Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000). Cite Greider, One World Ready or Not, pp. 132–134. For a detailed description of the continued rise in core industrial nations’ manufacturing productivity amidst continued downward pressure on wages due to international competition see Greider, One World, Ready or Not, chpt. 4, “Gleiche Arbeit, Gleicher Lohn” (Same Work, Same Pay), pp. 58–80. For the classic statement of the neo-liberal mantra of “train them and good jobs will come,” see Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism, (New York: Vintage, 1992). For the use of the ideology of “globalization” as a battering ram against public sector expenditure and union strength see Frances Fox Piven, “Is It Global Economics or Neo-Laissez Faire,” New Left Review (September–October, 1995): 107–114. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 354–357. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 348. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 348–350. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 97, 217–218. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 303. Hartdt and Negri, Empire, p. 367. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 336.

6 Does Globalization Necessitate the Demise of Democratic Egalitarian Politics? 1 For the conventional view from a centrist establishment perspective see Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat. For a pessimistic left-wing account of the constraints global capital places on the domestic welfare state see Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, Global Capitalism and American Empire (London: Merlin Press, 2004). 2 David Held, Global Covenant (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004), p. 25. 3 Held, Global Covenant, chpt. 1, “Economic Globalization,” pp. 21–33 and John D. Stephens and Evelyne Huber Stephens, “Globalization and European Welfare States,” Democratic Left XXXIV:4 (Spring 2007): 5. 4 Held in Global Covenant, particularly chpts. 5–6, pp. 89–117, makes the most reasoned case in favor of expanding regional and global political governance in order to democratically constrain global capital. But even this reasoned argument for “global social democracy” somewhat underestimates the ability of advanced states to politically shape and constrain the inegalitarian effects of corporate globalization. 5 For works that analyze both the constraints that globalization places upon policymakers in the advanced industrial democracies, but also the remaining political choices that can be made in regard to fiscal, taxation, and social welfare policy see Linda Weiss, ed., States in the Global Economy: Bringing Domestic Institutions Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); John D. Stephens and Evelyn Huber Stephens, Development and Crisis in the Welfare State; and Duane Swank, Global Capital, Political Institutions, and Policy Change in Developed Welfare States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 6 See Swank, Global Capital; Weiss, The Myth of the Powerless State and Weiss, ed.,

206 Notes

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

States in the Global Economy; and John Hobson, “Disappearing Taxes or Race to the Middle,” in Weiss, ed., States in the Global Economy. On the European countries reliance on VAT as a major source of fiscal revenue, see T.R. Reid, The United States of Europe (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 146–147. For comparative percentages of GDP spent on public spending among these nations, see Jonas Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe vs. Liberal America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 26. See Peter Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) and Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity, p. 26. See Paul Piersen, “The New Politics of Welfare,” World Politics 48(2): 143–179 and Piersen, ed., The New Politics of Welfare. Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity, pp. 76–80. See Stephens and Stephens, Development and the Crisis in the Welfare State, pp. 218–220. See Stephens and Stephens, Development and the Crisis in the Welfare State, pp. 7, 300–307. Stephens and Stephens, Development and the Crisis in the Welfare State, p. 220 and Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity, pp. 190–192. On the greater inequality of the United States and other “LMEs” as compared to the “SMEs,” see Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity, pp. 6, 39–53. Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity, pp. 157–160. On comparative poverty rates (before and after taxes), see Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity, pp. 153–161 and Reid, The United States of Europe, p. 148. See Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen, The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007). For comparative employment performance, see Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity, chpt. 4, pp. 67–94. See Stephens, Development and the Welfare State, p. 7 and Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity, 67–77. See Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity, pp. 74–76. This argument is central to Duane Swank’s Global Capital: Political Institutions, and Policy Change in Developed Welfare States. Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity, pp. 75–76. See Jason DeParle, American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare (New York: Viking, 2004). See Pamela Morris, Virginia Knox, Lisa A. Gennetian, “Welfare Policies Matter for Children and Youth: Lessons for TANF Reauthorization,” Manpower Development Research Corporation, Policy Brief, 2002. www.mrdc.org/publications/183/policy brief.html. Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity, pp. 4–12. Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). See Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). See Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Malden: Polity Press, 1999). See Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: An Essay on Education and Equality (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961). For an analysis of how French corporations eviscerated the job-creating intentions of the original thirty-five-hour week legislation, see Phillipe Askanazy, “France’s 35-Hour Workweek: Myths and Realities,” Dissent (Fall 2007): 29–35. See Giddens, The Third Way. On how costs of globalization fall disproportionately on displaced manufacturing workers in the First World, see Dani Rodrik, One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)

Notes 207

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36 37

38

39

40

41 42

and Dani Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1997). Hence the most “radical” voices in mainstream social policy come from corporate financiers such as Felix Rohatyn and George Soros! They well know the price unregulated global capitalism can bring to the global capitalist system. See George Soros, “The Capitalist Threat,” The Atlantic Monthly (February 1997): 45–58; George Soros on Globalization (New York: Public Affairs, 2002); and The Alchemy of Finance (Hoboken: Wiley, 2003). See also Felix Rohatyn’s frequent pieces in the 1990s on the global economy in The New York Review of Books (Rohatyn’s contributions ceased when he was appointed ambassador to France in spring 1996 and could no longer maintain as critical a stance toward the neo-liberal Clinton administration. They resumed after the election of George W. Bush). See Joseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006); Globalization and its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002); and Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (New York: Penguin, 2005). Sachs is a fairly recent convert to the need for state and international controls over finance capital, perhaps in penance for his advocacy of rapid deregulatory “shock therapy” in Eastern Europe immediately after the collapse of communism. See Jeffrey Sachs, “The IMF and the Asian Flu,” The American Prospect (March–April 1998): 16–21; and Jeffrey Sachs, Thye Woo, and Klaus Schwab, eds., The Asian Financial Crisis: Lessons for a Resilient Asia (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). Of course, even the strongest regional economic institution in the world cannot “afford” to raise the living standards of all nation-states. Hence, the European Union’s exclusion of Turkey and the poorer nations of Eastern Europe from future European Union expansion and the increasing likelihood of restrictive immigration policies against non-European Union nationals. See the article by labor policy-intellectual Lance Compa, “A Fast Track for Labor, The American Prospect 40 (September–October 1998): 60–64, in which he argues that labor advocates need to support the inclusion of stronger labor rights provisions in present and future international trade and investment accords. International relations theorists of global “interdependence” often exaggerate the effectiveness of such regimes and fail to see how their enforcement depends upon a consonance of interests among powerful nation-states. The need for threats of sanctions to enforce such agreements renders a “realist” twist on “interdependence” theory a necessary intellectual amendment. It is quite apparent that nation-states not yet integrated into global capitalism suffer even greater economic immiseration (witness the Bangladeshs and Tanzanias of the world). And it is the industrial working class, more so than a timid middle strata, which has played the central role in struggles for democratization in Korea, Brazil, South Africa and elsewhere. See Gay Seidman’s work on Brazilian and South African trade unionism, Manufacturing Militancy: Workers’ Movements in Brazil and South Africa 1970–1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Both Robert Putnam’s and Theda Skocpol’s work on autonomous associations in civil society fail to distinguish adequately between groups which engage in politics and those which do not. See Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); and Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). See also Skocpol’s essays in Theda Skocpol and Morris Fiorina, eds., Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1999). Putnam and Skocpol both downplay the crucial role political parties and unions play in public political life in most other advanced industrial democracies (although West European politics is becoming increasingly “Americanized”, with the media-marketing of personalities taking on growing importance as compared to more traditional forms of party identity).

208 Notes 7 Racism, Difference, and the Problematic Politics of Social Solidarity 1 For a thorough-going account of the role that conservative political manipulation of the politics of race played in the decomposition of the momentary Great Society coalition see Thomas and Mary Byrne Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Taxes, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). While I accept much of their descriptive analysis, I take issue, as demonstrated below, with their prescription that the Democratic Party can escape the dilemma of being defined as the party of minorities and “special interests” simply by adapting a universal, social democratic economic program. 2 Most intelligent, empirical studies of the urban poor reveal that only about 10 percent of inner-city adults exhibit those behavioral patterns associated with that loaded-term “the underclass”—i.e. an absence of a permanent job history; irregular engagement in child-rearing responsibilities; and/or drug addiction or alcoholism, etc. (Poverty rates hover around 40–50 percent in most inner-cities and unemployment rates around 25 percent, but often as high as 40 percent for males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four). That is, most inner city residents—and not just the majority who are in the working or middle class—hold quite similar values to those of non-inner city residents, except that the former have less physical security and resources. No doubt, some of the greater physical insecurity is caused by the behavior of some members of the “underclass.” Jennifer Hochschild utilizes a normatively less-loaded term of “estranged poor” to described residents who experience the living conditions described above. In 1990, the Bureau of the Census estimated that 5.7 million residents of cities lived in “distressed neighborhoods.” Approximately 30 percent of African-Americans live in such neighborhoods, but, obviously, not all these residents are members of the “estranged poor.” See Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 185–186. 3 While the universal programs of Social Security and Medicare went largely unscathed, the Reagan presidency witnessed 20 percent real cuts in AFDC benefit levels, 11 percent in food stamps, 90 percent in public housing assistance, and a serious erosion of the purchasing power of the working poor. Except for modest restoration of public housing expenditures, none of these cuts were restored under the Clinton administration, and its “welfare reform” contributed to a 50 percent drop in poor women receiving child support payments (TANF). 4 See William Julius Wilson, The Bridge Over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) and Theda Skocpol, Missing Middle: Working Families and the Future of American Social Policy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000). 5 Of particular note is the growing sentiment among some African-American intellectuals and activists that, on balance, desegregation served to disempower AfricanAmerican community control of inner-city business, public education, health care, etc. For a version of this argument see Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown Versus Board and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 6 For pre-Clinton “welfare reforms” expression of this position, see Cornel West, “Equality and Identity,” The American Prospect 9 (Spring 1992): 119–122 and Robert S. Browne, “The Road to Rectification,” The American Prospect 10 (Summer 1992): 93–96. See also Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, The Breaking of the Social Contract (New York: New Press, 1997). 7 See “Study Says Welfare Changes Made the Poorest Worse Off,” New York Times, August 23, 1999, p. A13. 8 See William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), Chapter 6, “The Hidden Agenda,” pp. 140–164 and Theda Skocpol, “Fighting Poverty without Poverty Programs, The American Prospect 2 (Summer 1990): 58–70.

Notes 209 9 For a comprehensive view of how New Deal programs and the post-World War II benefits for white GIs served as a form of affirmative action for the white working class see Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in 20th Century America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005). For a brief summary of how the construction of even the allegedly universal parts of the New Deal welfare state excluded people of color, and women who were not married to a male steady income-earner, from the full rights of social citizenship, see Linda Gordon, “Welfare Reform: A History Lesson,” Dissent (Summer 1994): 323–328. 10 See Jill Quadango, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 11 The classic intellectual statement of this perspective was Charles Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967). Carmichael and Hamilton do not advocate a separatist politics in this book, but rather that African-Americans should build a political machine comparable to those of urban white ethnic groups to be able to then engage in coalition politics with greater bargaining power for the Black community. 12 See Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). 13 For paradigmatic works see David R. Roediger, Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Become White (New York: Basic Books, 2005); The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White: Irish-Americans and AfricanAmericans in Nineteenth Century Philadelphia (New York: Verso, 1995); George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness,” American Quarterly V, 47:3 (1995); and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106:1707 (1993). 14 Of course, Moynihan and Glazer did not term such ethnic advancement strategies “affirmative” use of state power to redress structural ethnic and class discrimination. But urban political machines attack on “neutral,” “meritocratic,” Progressive Era modes of civil service testing and recruitment could be termed nothing else. See Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). 15 See Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1975). Glazer reversed his prior opposition to affirmative action for African-Americans in 1998. See James Traub, “Nathan Glazer Changes His Mind Again,” New York Times Magazine, June 28, 1998. 16 The myth of the Asian-American “model minority” precludes an analysis of the wide disparities in class, cultural capital, and generational status among and within Asian immigrant groups. Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, Hmongs, Khmers, and many recent Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants have not experienced the forms of upward mobility characteristic of third or forth generation Chinese and Japanese Americans. 17 For a succinct summary of a sophisticated “push” and “pull” analysis of the causes of mass undocumented immigration to the United States, see Jeff Faux, “What to Really Do About Immigration,” The American Prospect 19:1 (January/February 2008): 41–43. 18 See Quadango, The Color of Welfare and Margaret Weir, The Politics of Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 19 For such urgings see both George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness,” The American Quarterly V, 47:3 (1995) and “Editorial: Abolish the White Race—By Any Means Necessary,” Race Traitor 1 (Winter 1993): 4–5. 20 See “Editorial: Abolish the White Race—By Any Means Necessary,” Race Traitor 1 (Winter 1993): 4–5. 21 See Jonathan Skretny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

210 Notes 22 The often referenced classic statement of the dominance of post-material politics is Ronald Ingelhart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 23 On this point see Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) and Rebecca Klatch, Women of the New Right (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). 24 See Douglas Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 25 See Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race. 26 See Weir, The Politics of Jobs. 27 This money illusion—the failure of many working- and middle-strata taxpayers to see how flat payroll tax increases have outstripped whatever minimal income tax decreases they may have experienced—results partly from the segmented American welfare state’s promotion of Social Security as a direct benefit paid by earmarked payroll taxes, rather than a partially redistributive program financed from general tax revenues. 28 For a provocative discussion of how “defensive localism” on the part of states and suburban municipalities to offset federal aid cutbacks has exacerbated the fiscal and economic plight of inner cities, see Margaret Weir, “Urban Poverty and Defensive Localism,” Dissent (Summer 1994): 337–342. 29 See William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 30 See Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), chpt. 9, “Reverse Discrimination,” pp. 223–239. 31 Iris Marion Young advanced an argument in this vein in Justice and the Politics of Difference, esp. chpt. 7, “Affirmative Action and the Myth of Merit,” pp. 192–225. What she probably intended to say is that competence and skill in the helping and legal professions are not simply demonstrated by performance on abstract entrance exams to professional schools. But she could not have seriously meant that the ability to marshall evidence or cut straight in surgery is solely an ability irrelevant to the profession’s task. Rather, one might more soundly argue that traditional modes of recruitment have little if anything to do with predicting who will learn such practical techniques. But even in a society far more egalitarian and just than our own, there will be more or less skilled lawyers and doctors. 32 See Michael Walzer, “In Defense of Equality,” in Radical Principles: Reflections of an Unreconstructed Radical Democrat (New York: Basic Books, 1980). 33 On American society’s inability to comprehend class as a social reality see Benjamin DeMott, The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Class (New York: Morrow, 1990). 34 See Thomas Shapiro, The Hidden Cost of Being African-American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 35 See David Wessel, “Escalator Ride: As Rich-Poor Gap Widens in the U.S. Class Mobility Stalls,” The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2005: A1. 36 Richard Kahlenberg’s proposals for strictly class-based affirmative action fail to take into account these objections. See Richard Kahlenberg, The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action (New York: Basic Books, 1996). For a statistical analysis of how strictly class-based affirmative action would decrease opportunities for racial minorities see Andrew Hacker, “Goodbye to Affirmative Action?” The New York Review of Books 43:12 (July 11, 1996). 37 See Jessie Lemisch, “Angry White Men of the Left,” New Politics 6:2 (Winter 1997): 97–104. 38 In the Introduction and Chapter 3, I commented on the writings of Todd Gitlin, Michael Tomasky, Richard Rorty, Michael Tomasky, and Walter Benn Michaels. See Todd Gitlin, Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1995); Michael Tomasky, Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and

Notes 211 Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America (New York: Free Press, 1996); Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). 39 See Piven and Cloward, The Breaking of the American Social Compact (New York: The New Press, 1997). 8 Conclusion—Ending the False Antinomy of “Difference” and “Equality”: Toward an Egalitarian Democratic Pluralism 1 See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1975) and Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 2 See Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, chpt. 3, “Insurgency and the Welfare Capitalist Society,” pp. 66–95; see also Kathy Ferguson, The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). 3 See T.H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” in Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays (Cambridge [England], Cambridge University Press), chpt. 4, pp. 65–122. 4 See Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State, ed., John Keane (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984) and James O’Connor, Accumulation Crisis (New York: Blackwell, 1984). 5 See Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) and Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 6 See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 7 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003). 8 William Julius Wilson, The Bridge Over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) and Skocpol, The Missing Middle. 9 See Todd Gitlin, Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1995); Michael Tomasky, Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America (New York: Free Press, 1996); Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). 10 See Sheldon Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” American Political Science Review 63:4 (December 1969): 1062–1082.

Index

9–11, 31 academia: focus on diversity viii; ignoring inequality viii, 11, 33 Achterberg, Peter 188n19 AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) 7, 9, 20, 25, 134, 152–3, 165, 172, 181, 208n3 affirmative action 79, 81, 83, 93, 98–100, 102, 153, 156, 158–9, 163, 172, 181, 183, 193n43; class-based element in 94, 171; and the Clinton Administration 162; and democracy 18, 88, 90–2; and “difference” 18; and the left 101; and meritocracy 91–2, 167–70; and parental leave 96–7; policy 18; populist assault on 167; resentment of x, 18, 75; and the right 41, 74; see also Clinton Administration; democracy; identity; the left; meritocracy; the right Aglietta, Michael 203n14 Allegretto, Sylvia 188n15 American Political Science Association: on social inequality 9, 47 Anderson, Perry, on modernism and bourgeois norms 54 Anzaldúa, Gloria 194n13, 198n1 Appiah, Anthony 34 Arendt, Hannah, on identity and the polity 57 Arnold, Kathleen 9 Aronowitz, Stanley 69 autonomy 8, 29–30, 31, 38, 49, 78, 97, 102; and choice 66; conditions for 89; and democratic principles 58, 86–7; and feminism 66–7; fictive nature of 60–1; of homosexuals 79; of illiberal elements 80, 87–9; individual 36, 38, 83; and the marketplace 20, 30; for minorities 83; of national economies 182; neo-Kantian

and neo-Hegelian conceptions of 58; and “norming” 3, 49; over morals, justice and culture 95–6; and public policy 50, 83; and resistance 63; sexual 163; value of 57; see also feminism; norming; resistance Bachrach, Peter 3, 187n6 Baratz, Morton 187n6 Barber, Benjamin 9, 191n6; on global civil society 105; on global justice 191n9; see also civil society; justice Baudrillard, Jean 15; on agency 52; aestheticization of reality 55; on postmodern capitalist culture 54; “simulacrum” 31 Beitz, Charles 192n11; on global interdependence and moral obligation 32 Bell, Derrick 208n5 Benhabib, Seyla 9, 60, 97, 189n33, 190n46; critique of postmodernism 78; on democratic dialogue 44; on democratizing power 14; on genital cutting 89; on Islamic faith in the EU 35; on solidarity among “others” 51; see also democracy; post-structuralism; solidarity Berman, Marshall, on modernist dilemmas 54 Bernanke, Benjamin 109 Bernstein, Jared 188n15 Bickford, Susan 194n13; on the modernist “subject” 61; on performance 72; on Young’s “veto power” 83; see also performative; Young biopower 122, 125 Blackburn, Robin 203n7, n10, n12 Blackwater corporation 28 Blair, Tony 142; third-way governing of 115, 138–9; see also third-way governing

214 Index Blinder, Alan 173 Bradley, Thomas 11 Brennan, Timothy 192n16 Brown, Wendy 60, 187n3, 189n29, 194n14, 196n37, 211n5; on agonal struggle 50; on class economy 65; on equal deliberation 71; on foundational humanism 59; on identity politics 19, 50, 56–7; on “meta-discourses” 58; on moral deliberation 60; politics of radical democratic solidarity 56; on rights 66; on social dynamics 64; on the “stable self” 37; on the state 66–7; on truth and power 65–6; see also identity politics; rights Bryne Edsall, Mary and Thomas 193n43, 199n6, 208n1 Buckley v. Vallejo 31 Bush, George Jr. 31, 107, 111, 146; military Keynesianism 115; privatization of Social Security 165 Bush, George Sr. 114, 134, 161 Butler, Judith 187n2, 190n44, n46; on agency 63; on agonal politics 58; antiuniversalist feminist 60; on fellowfeeling 37; on foundational humanism 59; on identity 48, 56, 58; on “metadiscourses” 58; and operative politics 37; on “performativism” 48, 61–2, 64, 70; on political economy 70–1; politics of radical democratic solidarity 56; on power–knowledge discourses 60–1, 63; on resistance 49, 61, 63–4; on the self 37, 50, 61, 64 (see also the self); on social dynamics 64; on the “war of position” 60; see also identity; performative; radical democracy; resistance; the self; solidarity Callincoss, Alex 195n26, 204n16; on postmodern consciousness 52 Caney, Simon 189n33, 191n9 capitalism 5, 29, 54, 55, 70–1, 117; American 114; American faith in 3–4; casino 107, 149; and class solidarity 180–1; and commodification 52–4; cowboy and crony 145; and creative destruction 52–3, 111, 120; and democracy 3–4, 52, 118, 125; displacement of risk to employees 22; “enlightened” 44–5; finance 107–12, 114, 116–121, 125–7, 133, 144–5, 148, 204n20; global 9, 15, 20–1, 33, 40, 43, 108, 111–12, 114, 116, 118, 120, 124–6, 144, 149–50, 155, 205n4, 207n41; and

inequality 11, 21, 67, 73, 150; information and finance-driven 40, 54; Marxist–Leninist in China and Vietnam 52; mobility of capital versus labor 121; “monopoly” 53; and neo-liberalism 33, 75–6; and postmodernism 52, 103; and power 20, 73, 99; radical critique of 57; and resistance to globalization 183; and social mobility 75; speculative 21–2, 108–9, 111, 121, 125, 142, 144, 149; in the twenty-first century 113; varieties of 21; see also democracy; inequality; neo-liberalism; post-structuralism; social mobility Carmichael, Stokely 209n11 Carter, Dan T. 188n20 Carter, Jimmy 112; and racial inequality 154–5; and white privilege 162 Chavez, Hugo 204n21 Chen, Victor Tan 191n4 Cheney, Dick 111 child poverty rates 131 civil rights movement 8, 34, 39, 58, 74, 152, 154 civil society x, 30, 81, 87–9, 138, 178, 180, 207n43; global 43, 105–7, 143, 146, 149–50 class conflict 11, 29, 163 Clinton Administration 121, 174, 208n3; and affirmative action 162; neo-liberal policies of 7, 110–11, 135, 142; and public housing 166; and workfare 143; see also affirmative action: workfare Clinton, Bill 140, 174; on finance capital reform 117; and racial inequality 154–5; third-way governing of 115, 138–9; welfare policy of 153; and white privilege 162; see also third-way governing Cloward, Richard 164, 172 Cohen, Cathy 199n17 Cohen, Joshua 60, 189n33 Cohen, Steven 120 collective action problem 34 commodification: capitalist 54; of pleasure 123; of society 123; see also capitalism communism: collapse of 50, 69, 118; and the left 106; (post-) 144–5; and postmodern interpretation 123–4, 126; see also the left communitarianism: and boundaries 69; on communities 53, 179; on conceptions of meaning 55; on the “embedded self” 13, 64; exclusion and democracy 32; and individual rights 177; political commitments of 185; pragmatic 32; on

Index solidarity 44; on the Rawlsian rational chooser 178; rejection of rights 179; resistance to welfare state 180; versus liberal discourse 36–7; on visions of “strong democracy” 94; see also solidarity Compa, Lance 207n39 Connolly, William 3, 9, 187n6, 195n19; on agonal struggle 50; on global solidarity 69; on identity and democratic values 67–8; on identity politics 56; on “metadiscourses” 58; on moral deliberation 60; on operative politics 67; on poststructuralism and pluralism 67; on the “stable self” 37; see also identity politics conservatism: attacks on feminism 179; cultural 163; and fiscal orthodoxy 140; and the free-market x, 56, 171; hegemony of 30, 74, 76, 86, 121, 154–5, 173; ideology of 8, 10, 72, 75–6, 127, 188–9n22; mantra on taxes 165; (neo-) 122, 171; policies of x, 30; and politics of racial identity 151–3, 156, 171; populist 16; postmodernist 71; and property rights 178; reproductive rights 184; resentment of welfare 75, 82, 114, 129, 152, 155, 177, 184; resistance to social rights 162; stereotypes of liberals 179; and upward redistribution 180; see also right Cornell, Drucilla 190n46 cosmopolitanism 32, 34, 126, 150 creationism 88–9 da Silva, Lula Inacio, on global poverty 42 Dahl, Robert, on minority exclusion 98 Dean, Jodi: on democratizing power 14; on reflective solidarity 202n54 democracy 3; and affirmative action 18, 88, 90–2; agonal 37, 57–8; and autonomy 89; Benhabib on 51; and capitalism 3–4, 52, 118, 125; and class 10; communicative 13–14, 84, 95; and communitarianism 32, 94; and consensus 93–4; consociational 84; and cross-group coalitions 98; deliberative 13–14, 64, 80, 102; and difference 85, 96, 99, 102; division of labor 92; economic 99, 145–7; and empathy 27, 51; and equal moral worth 178; and feminism 59; and fraternity 30; and globalization 13, 182; and human nature 58; and identity 10, 16–18, 51, 59, 61–2, 68, 85, 96, 99, 101–2; and identity politics 77,

215

79, 81, 102; and illiberal elements 88–9; and immigration 43; and inequality 3–4, 9–10, 178, 180; justice 13, 27, 77, 79, 86–7, 94, 97; justification of 58–9, 65, 70; and legitimacy 98, 178; and liberalism, tension with 44, 87–8; and the market 30, 71, 75–6, 149; and multiculturalism 87; and neo-liberalism 24; and participation 57, 103, 189n33; and particularism 32, 90, 98; and pluralism 8; -pluralist dilemma 35; and power 14, 73, 76, 79–80, 99–100, 103; promise of viii; public policy 18, 27; and resistance 61–2, 204n27; and resources 31; revolutions 27; and rights 8, 13, 25, 40, 47, 57, 81, 83, 86; and social life 15; social movements 28, 34, 40, 44, 58, 69–70, 77–8, 146–7, 163; and solidarity 16–17, 28–9, 32, 34–5, 42, 45, 51, 68, 78, 94, 101; and transformation 123; and undemocratic elements 59, 68, 70–1, 80–1, 86, 89, 92, 96; values, norms, and principles of 15, 27, 51, 57–9, 68, 71, 87, 95, 97; Walzer on 34–6; “we” versus “other” 28, 58, 78; workplace 5; see also affirmative action; autonomy; Benhabib; capitalism; feminism: fraternity; globalization; identity; identity politics; immigration; inequality; justice; multiculturalism; neo-liberalism; particularism; pluralism; resistance; rights; social movements; solidarity; Walzer Democratic Party 112, 151, 208n1; and fiscal responsibility 108, 111, 121, 140, 174; and Great Society programs 165; internationalists 148; and neo-liberalism 7; non-socialist 38; politics of 164; Reaganite populist framing of 6; and the right to organize 137; Southern 38, 154, 156, 162; voting patterns of 9; see also neo-liberalism DeMott, Benjamin 210n34 Denton, Nancy 164, 189n27 DeParle, Jason 206n24 deregulation see neo-liberalism Derrida, Jacques 15, 60; on difference 48, 53 difference see identity distribution of wealth, U.S. 5 DuBois, W.E.B., on dual consciousness 155 Durkheim, Émile: on civil society and anomie 15 Dworkin, Ronald 79; on language and moral reasoning 102; on objective merit 167–8

216 Index Eagleton, Terry 10; on majoritarian politics 179; on pure theory 20 East Asian Financial Crisis 116, 119, 144–5, 149, 205n31 economic growth rates 24, 129–30, 132–3, 135–6 Edin, Kathryn 193n45 Eisenstein, Zillah: on difference and democracy 96; on identity politics 97; see also identity politics Enron scandal 107–12, 149 entrepreneurial ideology 6, 10, 71, 75, 171; (anti-) 138 equality 37, 56, 77, 79, 95–6, 152; of citizenship 178; concern for viii, ix; of deliberation 71; democratic 2, 14, 34, 67, 83, 99, 102, 174, 180, 185; as a democratic value 27, 105; and difference 52, 96, 179; of education 158, 166; gender 96; and identity politics 105; of income tax 166; and justice 76 (see also justice); and the left 151; legal 66, 75; of opportunity 2, 17, 35, 74, 76, 80, 83, 91, 94, 102, 122, 139–40, 162, 164, 178–9, 185; political 66, 75, 83, 86–7, 179; possibility of 51; of power 70, 99; racial 162–3; reform 86; sexual 74; socioeconomic 8, 37, 47, 57, 69, 97, 99, 162–3, 177–8, 199n18; and solidarity 67 (see also solidarity); structural barriers to ix; and trade policy 44; as a universal norm viii, 32; value of 59; versus liberty 44; of worth and potential 59, 68, 79, 92, 96, 98; see also identity politics; justice; the left; solidarity European Union: distributive justice 29; and global economic institutions 106–7; and the global free market 119; and guaranteed vacation 135; immigration and the right to work 44; integration of 45, 127, 149–50; and Islamic faith 35; living and labor standards 45, 144–6; protectionism 43–4; right to citizenship 35; social and human rights 33; trade conflicts of 125; see also protectionism Evans, David 204–5n30 Evans, Peter 15 exceptionalism 37, 39–40, 121, 193n35 Faux, Jeff 190n49, 191n5, 203n1, 209n17 Federal Reserve 108–10, 117, 144 Feldman, Leonard 9 feminism 3, 13, 50, 60, 62, 68–9, 73–4, 78, 96, 98, 179, 199n16; and class conflict 163; on equal citizenship 85; equality

and difference 14–15, 51–2; on group identity 57; and identity politics 14 (see also identity politics); on illiberal elements 86; on needs of “care” 41; on the “non-definability of woman” 59, 77; on the nuclear family 31; and poststructural analysis 47–8, 194n13; public–private distinction 49; on representation 81; the right’s attack on 172; social identity of 63; and solidarity 177; on subject and agency 49; on subverting the masculine state 66; see also identity politics; solidarity Fingleton, Eamonn 204n23 flex-security 23, 133–4, 141 Ford v. Miliken 158 Fordism 40, 54, 112–14, 120; (post-) 53, 113, 117 foreign direct investment 118, 137 Foucault, Michel 49, 60, 65, 67; on agency 63; on disciplinary society 122–3; on human reality 55–6; on “micro” institutions 18–19; on micro-power 19, 73 (see also micro-power); on the nature of the self 53; on “power-knowledge” 48; “subjects” and discourse 60; see also micro-power; the self Frank, Dana 204n29 Frank, Thomas 25, 198n4; on economic populism 156; on populist leftism 183 Fraser, Nancy 9, 14, 60, 196n51, 197n78, 199n16; on global justice 191n9; on public policy and the nuclear family 31; on redistribution 99–101; on selfreflection and self-possession 63; on social group narratives 62; on “subaltern” counter-publics 85 fraternity 17, 27, 38, 152, 193n37 free-market ideology see neo-liberalism freedom see autonomy French Revolution 27, 30 Freud, Sigmund 63 Friedman, Milton 6 Friedman, Thomas 21; on globalization 105, 120, 144; see also globalization Fung, Archon 189n33 Gadamer, Hans Georg, on communication and society 58–9 Gennetian, Lisa 206n25 Geras, Norman 34 GI Bill 17, 28, 40, 153–4, 174, 181 Giddens, Anthony: on globalization 105; on “structuration” 63; on third-way

Index governing 138–9; on welfare reform 142; see also globalization; third-way governing Gindin, Sam 205n1 Gingrich, Newt 115 Gitlin, Todd 172, 187n5, 198n4; on populist leftism 183 Glass, James, on “split-self” 19, 49 Glass–Steagall Act 108–9 Glazer, Nathan, on ethnic advancement strategies 158 globalization 16, 21, 47, 75, 107, 122–6, 149, 203n1, 204n16, 205n36; corporate 121, 150, 160; and the decline in living standards 182; and democracy 182; and Giddens 105; ideology of x, 180; and inequality x, 205n4; of production and circulation 124; and solidarity 105; and state policy 118; and T. Friedman 105, 120; see also Friedman, T.; globalization; inequality; solidarity Gordon, David 203n4, 209n9 Gore, Al, and fiscal policy 121, 140, 174 Gould, Carol 189n33; on democratic dialogue 44; on global civil society 105; on global justice 191n9; on public policy and the nuclear family 31; see also civil society Gramsci, Antonio 173 Greider, William 203n1, n5; n9, 204n22, 205n33, n34 Guiner, Lani, on representation 84 Gutmann, Amy 9, 189n32–3, 192n27, 201n41; on “fellow-feeling” 34; on group justice 86; on identity politics 82; on illiberal elements 87–8; see also identity politics Habermas, Jürgen 36–7, 77, 84, 95, 189n33; on communication and society 58–9; on democratizing power 14; on the ideal speech situation 70; on public deliberation 85 Hacker, Jacob 190n51 Hall, Peter 190n50 Hall, Stuart 204n18 Hallberthal, Moshe 201n41 Hamilton, Charles 209n11 Hardt, Michael, on the postmodern global world 122–6 Harris, Cheryl 209n13 Hartsock, Nancy 194n14 Hartz, Louis 193n35; on solidarity and individualism 38 Harvey, David 195n28, 196n34; on

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capitalist tendencies 54; on the rise of postmodern consciousness 52 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, on conceptions of freedom 58 Heidegger, Martin: critique of Platonic reality 53; gods of 60; reaction to modernity 52 Hekman, Susan 190n43, 195n20; on Foucaultian subjectivity 63; on identity politics 77, 84, 86–7, 95, 97; on illiberal elements 86–7; on post-structural orthodoxy 49; on self-reflection and selfpossession 63; on the ungrounded, grounded self 63–4 Henwood, Doug 204n16; on continuities in capitalism 118 Hobson, John, on openness and social expenditure 128 Hochschild, Jennifer, on “estranged poor” 208n2 Honig, Bonnie 9, 196n37 hooks, bell 199n17 Horowitz, David 4 Houtman, Dick 188n19 identity viii, 85, 101, 150, 192n16, 194n13; -based communities 95; boundaries of 67; Butler on 48; class 2, 74; collective 71; common 32, 73; contingent 67; deconstruction of ix, 100–1, 156, 161–2; and democratic concern 68; and difference 1, 2, 67, 95, 99; emergent 67; epistemological questions of ix; ethnic 100–1; and exclusion 61; fixing 49; forms of ix; gender 184; group viii 7, 19, 50, 56, 68, 71, 81, 86, 94, 100, 198n1, 200n23; and historical circumstance 198n2; human ix; and inequality 9; insurgent 102; legally-recognized 66; national 49, 101; and neo-Kantianism 37; and “otherness” 162; pan-Asian 80; particular 102; of particularly-situated citizens 95; personal 1; political 56–7, 71, 82; and post-structuralism ix, 3, 18, 51, 59, 61, 66, 70, 123, 151; and power–knowledge discourses 63, 197n59; primary 63; racial 71, 100, 151, 155–6, 184; and radical democratic theory 76; and rights 66; sexual and gender 59, 99–100; social 61, 63; in social life viii; and social movements 78, 85, 100; and social solidarity 2, 18, 29; sociological construction of 2, 63, 83; white 75, 156–9, 161–2, 182, 184; see also Butler; inequality; Kantianism;

218 Index identity continued post-structuralism; radical democracy; rights; social movements; solidarity identity politics viii, 4, 6, 16–17, 63, 86, 89, 199n9; and affirmative action 18, 90; and democracy 17, 77, 79, 81, 87; on democratic norms and justice 90; and difference 103, 172; and equal moral worth 87; and equality 105; essentializing types of 57; group-based 56; and group identity 50, 57; and inequality 69, 86, 183; and institutionalized difference 73; and the left 74; manipulation of 151; on meritocracy and affirmative action 169; and “otherness” 49; on the particular and universal 177; and pluralist democracy 18; politics of 185; radical 47; and radical democracy 74, 179; and social change 174; and the threat to pluralist democracy 102; universal 152, 171, 179; and universal programs 184; see also affirmative action; democracy; equality; inequality; the left; radical democracy Ignatiev, Noel 209n13 IMF see International Monetary Fund immigration 121, 132, 134, 142, 154, 181; “push” and “pull” factors of 159–61; into Europe 24, 36, 44, 115, 125, 160, 183, 207n38; into the US 43–4, 113–14, 120, 159 incarceration rates 101, 134, 138, 163, 185 individualism 6, 17, 27, 35, 38, 56, 64, 71, 75–6, 100, 158, 165, 167; (anti-) 64 inegalitarianism see inequality inequality 10–11, 20, 90, 103, 148–9, 154; and academia 11; and the APSA 9; and capitalism 11, 21, 67, 73, 150; class 76, 93, 100, 166, 170–1, 178, 198n4; cultural 73; and democracy 3–4, 9–10, 16, 178; deregulation and de-unionization x; and the distribution of power 3; and diversity 74; educational 95; and globalization x, 205n4; group 183; growth in viii, 1, 2, 16, 21–2, 24, 33, 74, 114, 137, 138–9, 180; and identity 9; and identity politics 69, 86, 183; injustice of ix; labor market 54; in a market-based economy 27; and the mass media 11; and meritocracy 139; of opportunity 170; political 30; and post-structuralism 67, 73; of power 73, 102; public attention to 11; racial 154–5, 166–7, 183; socio-economic viii, ix, 30, 47, 55, 67,

71, 73–4, 76, 86, 95, 102, 107, 113, 159, 171, 173, 178, 180, 183; and solidarity 32; structural 99, 105, 166, 170, 183; threat posed by x; in the U.S. 4, 23, 106; wage 121; see also academia; capitalism; democracy; globalization; identity politics; meritocracy; post-structuralism; solidarity Ingelhart, Ronald 210n22 International Court of Justice 43 international institutional reform 147–8 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 43–4, 107, 112, 116, 119, 124, 143, 205n31 Isaac, Jeffrey 1 Jackson, Jesse 11 Jacobs, Elisabeth 188n11 Jacoby, Russell 195n16 Jameson, Frederic, on the rise of postmodern consciousness 52 Jefferson, Thomas 27 Jim Crow Laws 163 Jospin, Lionel 115 justice 74, 86, 90, 97, 199n9; conflicting views of 35; democratic 13, 77, 79, 86–7, 94; distributive 13, 29, 95; and equality 76; global x, 13–14, 31, 33, 42, 106, 147, 148; Kantian 35; liberal 77, 95, 199n18; “normed” conception of 77; pluralist 77; political 80; politics of 101; practices of 78; principals of 13, 77; racial 161; radical theories of 78; Rawls’ theory of 14, 36, 70; relational and universal 97; shared conception of 95; socioeconomic 2, 16, 32–5, 51, 69, 79, 94, 97, 99, 102, 161, 183–4, 199n16, 200n18; universal 35, 56, 77, 101, 200n23; value of 59; see also democracy; equality; Kantianism; norming; pluralism; radical democracy; Rawls Kahlenberg, Richard 210–1n37 Kant, Immanuel, on equal moral worth and democracy 33 Kantianism: conservative 60; impartial observer 37; on justice 35; and the and moral heuristics 70; (neo-) universalists 32; on the self 36–7; see also identity; neo-Kantianism; rights; the self Katzenstein, Peter, on nation size, integration, and social expenditure 128 Katznelson, Ira 190n54, 193n33, 209n9; on the GI Bill and equal citizenship 40 Kelly, Robin, on race, class, and gender 74 Kerner Commission 186

Index Keynes, John Maynard 112, 137, 142; “liquidity trap” 144; on market regulation 108; on over-production and under-consumption 137 Keynesianism 6, 8, 20, 40, 44, 105, 107, 112, 114, 139, 143, 171; global 116, 145, 182–3; military 111, 114–15; regime of accumulation 113, 171; and the social structure of accumulation 113; see also regime of accumulation; social structure of accumulation King, Martin Luther 12, 34, 75, 164; on injustice 74 Klein, Melanie, object-relations psychology of 63 Knox, Virginia 206n25 Kropotkin, Peter 191n2 Krugman, Paul 137 Kuttner, Robert 144, 189n24, 191n5, 203n5 Kymlicka, Will: on affirmative measures 88; on autonomy for minorities 83 Kyoto Accords 42–3 Laclau, Ernesto 78, 194n7 laissez-faire see neo-liberalism Lappin, Shalom, on illiberal elements 88 left, the 51, 85, 106, 111–12, 114, 116, 178, 195n17; American 2, 43; class identity 51; coalition of 7; and continuities in capitalism 118; and cultural conservatism 59; decline of 10, 74–5, 181; defense of pluralism 8; defensive politics of 172–3; entrepreneurship 138; on equality 151; European 2, 6; and foreign aide 32; French 115; global 40, 106; globalization 127; and identity politics 74; intellectual 99, 106, 171; labor market policies 23; and Latin American governments 145, 204n21; majoritarian 186; and the middle class 2; on patriarchal practices 74; pessimism of 123; and populism 183–4; postmodern 122–3; progressive taxation 41, 115; and public provision 174, 181; redistributive policies of 18, 146; resistance to Nazism 34; responding to racial politics 25; and social rights 27, 33; and solidarity 177, 183, 186; on solidarity and citizenship 57; theory and practice 47; universal service 40; viewed as unpatriotic 39–40; on welfare 99, 101; see also conservatism; equality; globalization; identity; patriarchy; progressive taxation; radical democracy; redistribution; social democracy; solidarity; welfare

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Leidner, Robin, on militant particularism 97–8 Lemisch, Jesse 171 Lenin, V.I., on surplus capital 118 Levinas, Emmanuel, on empathy and solidarity 37 liberalism 3–4, 10, 40, 48, 60, 75, 85, 96–7, 101–2; conception of human nature 77; conception of individual 71; critiques of 49–50, 56, 77–9; demise of 47, 172; feminist reconstruction of 77; hegemony of 8, 47, 76; homogenizing nature of 1, 79; and identity 67; and justice 36; on justice and citizenship 95; Lockeian 17, 76; and meritocracy 91–3; and multiculturalism 99; and politics 99–100; and power 71; as public anathema 6, 39; on racism 162; and the rational chooser 72; Rawlsian 1, 10, 70; rights-based 179; social policies of 7; and solidarity 24; tolerance of 67, 76, 86–9; triumph in the 1960s 164; and universal justice 56; versus communitarianism 36–7; versus democracy 44, 87; and the welfare state 181; white urban 155; see also communitarianism; democracy; feminism; justice; identity; Locke; meritocracy; multiculturalism; Rawls; solidarity Lind, Michael 198n4 Lipietz, Alain 203n14 Lipset, Seymour Martin 193n35 Lipsitz, George 209n13, n19 Locke, John 76 Luker, Kristin 210n23 Lyotard, Jean-François 15; on agency 52; aestheticization of reality 55; on postmodern capitalist culture 54; rejection of enlightenment principles 48 McBride, Keally 9 McIntyre, Alasdair 60; republicanism of 78 MacKinnon, Catherine, on identity political theory 57 MacPherson, C.B. 3 Madrik, Jeff 203n11 Manza, Jeff 206n29 Marcuse, Herbert 10; on commodified society 123–4 Margalit, Avishai 201n41 Marks, Gary 193n35 Marshall, T.H.: on democracy and equal moral worth 178; on the welfare state 5

220 Index Marx, Karl 19; Capital 122; on capitalist commodification 54; on democracy and social theory 15; on diversity viii; on equality and difference 14, 96; gods of 60; on inequality and democracy 10; on the universal class 39, 74 Marxism 19, 48, 51, 127, 146, 192n16; capitalism of 52; on class politics 49; and difference viii: on knowledge and power 53; on the laws of motion of capital 54; (post-) 37; on structuralism and agency 48–9; teleological 56, 69; see also capitalism Massey, Douglas 164, 189n27 Medicare 115, 134, 136, 152, 159, 165, 173, 182, 208n3 meritocracy: and affirmative action 91–2, 167–70; in civil service jobs 167; in educational system 27, 139, 157; ideology and redistributive policy 24; and inequality 140; liberal 92; see also affirmative action; inequality; liberalism meta-narratives 50 Michaels, Walter Benn 187n5, 198n4 “micro-power” ix, 19–20, 67, 71, 73 Mill, John Stuart, on inequality and democracy 10 Miller, Richard 192n12 Minow, Martha: on difference and equality 51–2; on difference and rights 95–6; on identity politics 97; see also identity politics Mishel, Lawrence 188n15 modernity 29, 52, 63; aesthetic high-point 53; on agency and moral responsibility 62; on the autonomous subject 60–1; capitalist 52–3; crisis of 53–4; education and sexuality of 16; geography of 11; and identity 67; physical; and pluralism 67; post-modern critique of 48; and premodernity 53; and self-reflection 63; see also capitalism; identity; pluralism Moore, Barrington 15, 189n26, 195n22 moral consequentialism 60 moral economy 15; of the decline in welfare liberalism 180; and inequality in the U.S. viii, 20 Morone, James: on “social citizenship” 17; on U.S. social welfare policies 36 Morris, Pamela 206n25 mortgage crisis 107–10, 149 Mouffe, Chantal 78, 194n7 Moynihan, Daniel, on ethnic advancement strategies 158 multiculturalism 96, 99

NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 145, 159–60 National Association of Women’s Studies 98 Negri, Antonio, on the postmodern global world 122–6 neo-classical economics see neo-liberalism neo-Kantianism: on freedom 58; on identity 37; on rights 33 neo-liberalism 6, 41, 182, 198n4; AngloAmerican 21; and the Clinton Administration 7, 110–11; and corporate globalization 160; and deregulation 105–12, 114, 118–20, 125, 141; and fiscal orthodoxy 140; global x, 7, 107, 191n5; and global capitalism 33; hegemony of 32; hostility towards progressive taxation 174; ideology of x, 18, 38, 56, 105, 110, 125; mantra of 205n35; models of capitalist development 33; models of economic growth 24; and monetarist elites 148; and outsourcing 111; policies of 20, 39, 74, 142; politics of 5, 23; and public goods 120; and social movements 204n21; and the “Washington Consensus” 44, 108, 112, 116, 125; and welfare 27, 143 New Deal 8, 17, 28, 38–9, 75, 108, 111, 136, 146, 148, 151–4, 157, 171–2, 178, 181, 183 Newman, Katherine 191n4; on the working “near poor” 5, 113, 131 Nietzsche, Friedrich 67; gods of 60; on the nature of the self 53, 55–6; reaction to modernity 52; on the ubermensch 58; on the “will-to-power” 51, 57, 183 Nixon, Richard 8, 151, 158, 161, 174 No Child Left Behind 12, 185 norming 19–20, 37, 49–50, 61, 63, 72, 179 Nozick, Robert 60, 211n1 Nussbaum, Martha 79; on equality and difference 51–2; on reconstructing liberalism 77 Offe, Claus 28, 211n4 Okin, Susan 60; on equality and difference 51–2; on illiberal elements 87; on reconstructing liberalism 77 Orloff, Anna 193n31 Panitch, Leo 205n1 particularism 32, 90, 95–8 Pateman, Carole, on identity 3 paternalism 97, 146–7, 163 patriarchy 96, 179, 185 performative ix, 151; actions 61, 70;

Index behavior 64, 70; choices 19, 65; discourse 1, 61; inscription of behavior 19; options 3, 19, 65, 70; practices 61–2, 71; resignification 61, 70, 196n51; resistance 1, 4, 19, 62, 64, 71–2, 162–3; roles 49; self 48, 64, 70–1; strategy 19; transformation 64; see also resistance; the self Permanence of the Political, The viii, 16, 195n17, 196n40 Phelan, Shane 198n1 Phillips, Ann 201n33–5; on difference, inequality, and democracy 15; on public policy and the nuclear family 31; on redistribution versus recognition 101; on rights and particularity 96 Pierson, Paul 204n19; on rates of social expenditure 128–9 Piketty, Thomas 188n9 Piven, Frances Fox 153, 164, 172, 205n36 pluralism 1–3, 10, 13, 18, 51, 58, 70, 77, 84, 86, 88, 96; and affirmative action 98; (anti-) 36, 79–80; and autonomous choice 89; and common citizenship 17; and Connolly 67, 69; on democracy and power 73; and democratic participation 103; and democratic procedure 98; and difference 68; and equality 14, 16, 26, 37, 47, 83, 95–7, 99, 102–3; and excluded groups 98; and feminism 59; and freedom of association 177; and identity 73, 78, 83, 85, 94, 100–2; and identity politics 57, 61; and illiberal elements 87–8; and justice 94, 97; and particularism 98; and power 71; public philosophy of 56; role of 8, 16; and shared citizenship 178; and solidarity 24, 81; versus democracy 35; Walzer 35; Young 77–80, 94–5; see also affirmative action; Connolly; equality; feminism; identity; identity politics; justice; particularism; solidarity; Walzer; Young, Iris Marion Pogge, Thomas 192n11; on global justice 32, 191n9 Polanyi, Karl, on the market 52, 118–19 Polgreen, Lydia 194n47 political campaign finance 31 political theory: abstract theory versus political practice 16; anti-establishment 52; anti-political turn of 13; conception of rights 37; on democracy and inequality 178; and democratic conflict 37; emancipatory 72; on identity and equality 102–3; ignoring inequality viii, x, 10–11, 15, 178, 180; informs public

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debate 177; on legitimacy 98; on the new conservative ideology 10; post-structural mode of analysis 47; and poststructuralism 48, 50; and social solidarity 32; and social structure 60; and social transformation 51; subjectivity, identity, and difference 47; on unions 9; see also post-structuralism; solidarity; unions politics of “difference” see identity politics politics of recognition 99, 202n66 Pontusson, Jonas 190n52–3, 192n13, 193n44, 206n8; on performances of liberal and social market economies 130 post-modernism see post-structuralism post-structuralism 16, 19, 126, 188n22, 192n16, 194n14; on agency 48–9, 51; agonal politics 1, 47; “anti-metanarrative” x, 60; cannon 48; compression of space and time 11; critics of 20; and democratic majoritarian spirit 3; on the democratic project 20; discourse ix, 71; downplay of structural constraints 55; emancipatory political strategy 50; epistemology of 58–9, 67, 69; on ethical concerns 20; and excluded groups 68; focus on discourse 51–2, 65; fragmentation 150, 179; on grand metanarratives 50, 58; on human interdependence, dignity and potential 69; identity ix, 3, 18, 51, 59, 61, 66, 70, 123, 151; and identity politics 57; on individual choices 20; and inequality 67, 73; political metaphysics of 60; and political theory 48, 50; and politics 67; public philosophy of 56; on the Rawlsian rational chooser 178; on resistance 71, 73; resistance to welfare state 180; on rights 49, 66; on the self 1, 10, 13, 37, 49–50, 64; on the self and norming 178–9; and social movements 59, 73; and social theory 48, 72; and the social world 55; and solidarity 177; on solidarity and equality 67; on the “subject” 50; suspicion of enlightenment conceptions ix, 48; tension with radical democracy 56, 58, 67; teleology 69; theory of 50; the turn of ix, 18; and “whiteness” 156 poverty, rates of 164 pragmatism 55, 62 privatization 116, 130, 139; of the penal system 111; of pensions 133, 139; rapid 145; and the right 174; of Social Security 165; of social services 108, 155; see also the right; Social Security

222 Index progressive taxation 12, 24–5, 29–30, 41, 70, 76, 96, 115, 121, 136, 140, 153, 156, 172, 174, 182, 184, 190n56 proportional representation 133, 201n36 protectionism 43–4, 143 public provision see social expenditure public space 13, 65; segregation of 11 Putnam, Robert 207n43; on the decline of associational life 4, 31 Quadagno, Jill 154, 161, 193n34, 199n5 race-to-the-bottom x, 7, 21, 33, 43, 106, 116, 127, 145, 149 radical democracy 15, 18, 31, 37, 58, 60, 78; and anti-democratic elements 68; on capitalism and rights 29, 57; commitment to difference and equality 16, 47, 69, 95, 97, 102; concepts of oppression 91; on “deconstructing” 71; and democracy 3; on discourse 65; and education 4; and equal moral worth 59; on global capital and the state 122; and group political activity 85–6; homogenizing nature of 79; and identity 56–7, 67–8, 70–1, 76–7; and identity politics 74, 179; and inequality 1–4, 16, 71; and meritocracy 92–3; and participation 103; and performative acts 70; and post-structuralism 48–9, 51, 56, 67, 69–70; and progressive taxation 70; and power 99, 102; on relational and universal justice 97; and standards of living 43; and teleology 51; theory versus social movements 20; Young 94–5; see also capitalism; democracy; equality; identity; identity politics; inequality; left; meritocracy; performative; poststructuralism; progressive taxation; social democracy; standard of living; Young Rainbow Coalition 79, 100, 102, 172–3 rational choice theory 56 Rawls, John 1, 3, 10, 12, 14, 95, 98; concept of rights 37; difference principle 32; on equality of opportunity 139–40; on liberalism and empathy 36; on the original position 13, 64; principles of justice 70, 79, 131, 178, 199n10; on the “rational chooser” 64, 70, 72, 78, 178–9; on reflective equilibrium 13, 62, 178; social welfare liberalism 56; on the veil of ignorance 64; see also rights; justice Reagan, Ronald x, 5–6, 10, 20, 30, 39, 107, 111–12, 114–16, 118, 129, 134, 136–8,

161, 166, 172, 182; divisive politics of difference 6, 151–2, 189n22, 193n43; and the right to strike 8; and taxation 165 realism: (anti-) 59; Gramscian 60; Machiavellian 60 redistribution 94, 99, 101, 156, 173, 204n21; of opportunity 67, 100, 102, 163; politics of 146; of power 69, 84–5, 90, 94, 102, 162–3, 179; of resources 67, 69, 84, 102, 108, 124, 131, 140, 166, 183; and solidarity 36; upward 111, 138, 180, 182; see also solidarity regime of accumulation 112, 114 regulatory school, on capitalist development 112 Reich, Robert 121, 189n24, 191n6; “symbolic manipulator” class 157 Reid, T.R. 206n7 relativism 96 Republican Party 5–7, 10, 16, 24, 75; defeat in 2006 elections 115; and Great Society programs 165; and immigration reform 160; and military-Keynesianism 107; and racial politics 151, 161; silent majority 154; tax-cutting policy 111 resistance 49, 61, 63–4, 71–3, 123, 125–6, 150, 204n27 Reuschemeyer, Deiter 195n23 right, the 112, 114, 173; affirmative action 41, 74, 101; attack on Keynesian liberalism 174; attack on universal health care 182; attack on welfare 17, 166, 191n56; contemporary politics of “white” identity 7, 24–5; and economic growth 115; and the free market 21, 74–5; and globalization 127; hegemony of 16, 20, 24, 30, 115, 162, 174, 181; marginalizing egalitarian politics 15; militarism of 182; and multiculturalism 96; and the new universal subject 10, 13; and patriarchal practices 74; politics of division 73; populism of 180; and privatization 174; and public provision 181; and racial politics x, 24–5, 151, 163, 172, 198n4; and social rights 27; socioeconomic policies of 74; and special interests 171; valuing entrepreneurial work ethic 21, 75; see also affirmative action; conservatism; globalization; multiculturalism; patriarchy; privatization rights 7, 98, 123, 197n67, 200n25; basic 58; citizen 8, 39, 43–4, 81, 106; civil 7–8, 12, 24, 34, 39, 47, 57–8, 74–5, 151, 172;

Index cultural 97; democratic 13, 40, 57, 81, 86; denial of 39; to education 87; environmental 33; equal 58; of the excluded 86; of exit 87, 201n41; gay and lesbian 6–7; global 33; group 66, 83, 158; to health care 35; human 20–1, 29–30, 32–4, 43–5, 106, 143, 145–8; and identity 66; to illiberal association 87; immigrant 161; individual 103, 177; intellectual property 119, 125; labor 8, 106, 145–6, 149; liberal 179; to organize 22, 70, 161; majority 80; minority 80, 83; moral principles of 95–6; and neoKantianism 33; and obligations 179; and the paternal state 66; political 39, 47, 57–8, 70; political theory’s conception of 37; and post-structuralism 49; property 178; Rawlsian conception of 37; and relational strategies 96; reproductive 74, 79, 172, 184, 198n4; to security 96; of sexual expression 59; social movements for 57; socio-economic 4, 5, 12, 25, 30, 32–3, 39, 47, 75, 86, 94, 151, 154, 161, 177, 180; to strike 8; theorists 45; transgendered 8; to a union 76, 112, 137, 145, 180; universal 25, 68, 78; welfare 184; and Wendy Brown 66; to work 44; of workers 24, 39; of the working class and poor 10 Rodrik, Dani 190n49, 207–8n34 Roediger, David 209n13 Rohatyn, Felix 203n3; on global speculation 44 Roosevelt, Franklin 154 Rorty, Richard 172, 187n5, 192n10, 195n27, 198n4; on populist leftism 183; on solidarity 34; see also solidarity Rosenblum, Nancy L. 192n23 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: on inequality and democracy 10; on legitimacy 98 Royale, Segolene 115 Rubin, Robert 110, 121 Sachs, Jeffrey, on global finance 144–5 Saez, Emmanuel 188n9 Sandel, Michael 60, 189n29, n31, 192n10, n26, 211n5; on fellow feeling 36; republicanism of 78 Sanders, Lynn 189n34 Sartre, John-Paul 199n13 Scahill, Jeremy 191n1 Schroder, Gerhard 141 Schwartz, Nelson 203n8 Scott, Joan 14 securitization of risk 22

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Seidman, Gay 207n42 self, the 19, 197n59; Butler on 37, 50, 61, 64; communally-constructed 53; communicative 124; and the desires of “others” 58; epistemological differences of 37; fragmented 56, 64, 72; Kantian conceptions of 36–7; “liminal” 37; metaphysical and ontological nature of 13; narrative of 49; and norming 178; performative 48, 64, 70–1; and poststructuralism 1, 10, 13, 37, 49–50, 64; sense of ix; social constraints on 62; ungrounded, grounded 63; see also Butler; Kantianism; norming; performative; post-structuralism Sen, Amartya 34, 79; on diversity 80 Sewell, William, on fraternity 38 Shapiro, Ian 9; between the normative and empirical in political science 15 Shapiro, Thomas 210n35 Shelby, Tommie 9 Shepard, Matthew 65 Sikkink, Kathryn, on global civil society 105 Skocpol, Theda 9, 15, 164, 193n31, 207n43; on deracializing American politics 25; on the GI Bill 40; on universal social programs 153, 181; see also GI Bill Skretny, Jonathon 210n21 Smith, Adam 56, 137, 171 social constructivists 64 social democracy 32, 36, 83, 100, 102, 106, 125–6, 137, 146, 166, 171, 172, 184; agenda of 39, 76; on basic goods and equal opportunity 35, 82; class-based politics 25, 49; and class solidarity 155; demise of 47, 50, 74, 180; on education 4; on employment and economic growth 143; faith in education 139; and finance capital 204n20; Fordism and Keynesianism 40; global 205n4; and globalization 47; and identity politics 74; and the ideology of the right 115; Marshall 5; policies of leveling-up 148; as public anathema 39; on racial blindness 174; on rights 36–7; solidarity and citizenship 41; universal public provision 153; weakened in Europe 23, 115, 181; and Young 94; see also globalization; identity politics; left; Marshall; radical democracy; rights; Young social expenditure 29, 112, 128–34, 136–8, 151–3, 155–6, 166–7, 177–8, 180–1, 184–5

224 Index social mobility: barriers to 167; downward x, 2, 75, 114, 158, 173; and education 140; increased for finance and productive capital x; rates of 25, 187n4; upward 76, 134, 154, 167; U.S. decline 5, 122; U.S. versus Europe 24, 170–1 social movements 30, 36, 44, 59, 67, 79, 81, 124–6; of the 1960s and 1970s 8; across borders 14, 182; and democracy 28, 34, 40, 44, 58, 69–70, 77–8, 145–7, 149–50, 163; and democratic principles 57–8; domestic 148; for economic security 36; of the excluded 32; and expanding conceptions of “we” 28; for expansion of rights 39, 57; and identity 58, 67, 73, 78, 85, 100; and international institutions 145; and neo-liberalism 204n21; and resistance 72; and shared experience 49; and solidarity 34; and solidarity/ diversity dichotomy 69; transnational 43, 105–7, 115, 119; universalist impulse 34; using state power 70; versus academic theory 20; see also democracy: identity: neo-liberalism: resistance: solidarity Social Security 8, 17, 38–9, 115, 134, 136, 152–3, 155, 159, 165, 208n3, 210n27 social space see public space social structure of accumulation 112–14, 116 solidarity 11, 56, 63, 150, 179, 184–5, 194n13; bonds of 29, 35, 41, 76, 78; class 155; commitment to 25; communitarian 44; cross-communal 94, 154; decline of 11, 16, 28, 180; and democracy 16, 27, 29–30; democratic 32, 34–5; and democratic equality 3, 24, 78; as a democratic value 27; and difference 25, 69, 74, 94, 162, 183, 202n54; domestic 42; and economic security 33; and equality 67–8; and feminism 177; ethnic, immigrant, racial, or gender 29; global (international) 33, 42–3, 45, 69, 106, 145–6; and globalization 105; and identity 2, 18, 29; and inequality 32; Jewish 37; and the left 177, 183, 186; in Lockean liberal culture 17; moral and political 94; as a moral value 17; and nationalism and nativism 24; new forms 106; and pluralism 24; and political theory 32; politically determined 37; politics of 4, 33, 45, 101, 177; and popular consciousness 152; and poststructuralism 177; and public philosophy 177; and public policy 30,

41; Richard Rorty on 34; sense of ix, 81, 94; and shared experience 11; and social rights 4; as a universal norm viii; in the U.S. 38; and the welfare state 37; and the working class 2; working definition of 28; see also communitarianism; democracy; equality; feminism; globalization; identity; inequality; the left; pluralism; political theory; poststructuralism; Rorty: welfare Soros, George, on financial speculation 44, 144–5 Soskice, David 190n50 stagflation 115 standard of living 33, 106, 117, 146, 147, 163, 207n38; and currency devaluation 119; downward pressure on 40, 45, 114–16, 180; of former welfare recipients 135; global 43, 114, 143; leveling up 144–5; mass 45, 144; U.S. versus Europe 24; working class 113 Stephens, Evelyn 195n23, 204n20, 205n5; on social expenditure 129; see also social expenditure Stephens, John D. 190n52, 195n23, 204n20, 205n5, 206n20; on social expenditure 129; see also social expenditure Stiglitz, Joseph 204n28; on global speculation 44, 144 Strauss, Leo 60 structuralism 53 Swank, Duane 190n50, 205n5; on openness and social expenditure 128 Tan, Kok-Chor, on global justice 191n9 Taylor, Charles: on fellow feeling 36; on self-reflection and self-possession 63 Thatcher, Margaret 5, 20, 114–16, 129–30, 133, 138, 151 Thiel, Leslie, on social group narratives 62 third-way governing 115, 138–43 Thompson, Dennis 189n33 Thompson, E.P. 193n37 three-speed society 113 Tomasky, Michael 198n4; on populist leftism 183 Tronto, Joan, on the equal respect of social solidarity 41–2 Uggen, Christopher 206n29 unemployment, rates of 127, 129, 131–4, 135, 141–2, 170 Ungar, Roberto 196n40 unions x–xi, 34, 62, 75–6, 80, 85–6, 105,

Index 112, 124, 126, 133, 137, 140, 146, 160, 164, 172–3, 180, 184, 190n49, 205n36; activists 29; attitudes toward 9; busting 39; corporate attack on 22; and democratic society 8; density rates 22–3; and deregulation 141; international movement of 43–5, 146; membership and voting behavior 9; motto 28; in newly industrializing nations 21; and permanent employment 132; and political theory 9; racial and gender integration 11; weakening 113; see also political theory United Nations, and US intervention 122 universal health care 17, 25, 35, 70, 85, 110, 115, 133, 135–6, 142, 153, 155, 164, 167, 174, 181, 183 van der Waal, Jeoroen 188n19 Veneroso, Frank 205n31 Voss, Kim 193n32 Wade, Robert 205n31 Walzer, Michael 3; on democratic community and social welfare 34; on meritocracy and affirmative action 169; on particular and universal values 35; on resigned resistance 49; on the social critic 61; see also affirmative action; meritocracy; resistance Washington Consensus see neo-liberalism Weber, Max 111; gods of 60; on moral economy 15 Weir, Margaret 161, 193n31; on behavior and welfare 165 Weiss, Linda 190n50, 204n26, 205n5; on openness and social expenditure 128 welfare: (anti-) 5–6; bureaucratic nature of 28; cuts in 33, 107, 114, 128–9, 133, 135, 178; and globalization 47, 127–8; and the economy 132–3, 136–6, 152, 182; and “factory-society” 124; means-tested versus universal 6; origins of 15; as percent of GDP 128; politics of 6; postWorld War II expansion of 44; and racial politics 153–7, 163, 180–1 reform of 101, 131, 135, 142–3, 153, 165, 172, 184; resistance to 17, 75, 82, 122, 152,

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155, 177–8; Sandel on 36; and war 36, 40; weakening in Europe 23; see also globalization; Sandel Wessel, David 210n36 West, Cornel 153, 199n17 Wiley, George 164 Williams, Patricia, on equal protection 66 Wilson, William Julius 100, 170, 189n28, 193n41; on deindustrialization 164; on deracializing American politics 25; on universal social programs 153, 181 Winnicott, W.D., object-relations psychology of 63 Wisconsin v. Yoder 97 Wolffe, Paul 189n26 Wolin, Sheldon 3, 211n10; on Machiavellian realism 60 workfare 101, 114, 129, 142 World Bank 43, 107, 112, 116, 119, 124, 143–5 World Social Forum 146, 149 World Trade Organization 107, 119, 124, 147 Wright, Eric Olin 189n33 Young, Iris Marion 9, 187n2, 189n29, 190n43, 201n35, 211n2; critique of the Rawlsian rational chooser 78; on democratic community 78; on the democratic division of labor 92–3; democratizing power 14; on difference and power redistribution 94; on discriminatory affirmative action 90–2; on diversity 79–80; on identity and democracy 85; on identity and justice 94; on illiberal elements 86–7; on meritocracy and affirmative action 169; on minority/majority rights 80; particular versus universal commitments 95; on the politics of difference 77, 84; on redistribution 99; on representation 84; on social group narratives 62; on social movements 79; on veto power 80, 82–4, 200n21 Young, Michael, on meritocracy and inequality 140 Zysman, John 120