Reed Adolph - Without Justice For All: The New Liberalism And Our Retreat From Racial Equality

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Adolph Reed Jr.

THIS BOOK COMES TOGETHER as a direct challenge to a rightward-tacking narrative that has gained currency in American liberal politics in general and the Democratic Party in particular. Partly spurred by Reaganism's success in the 1980s, this narrative has become an orthodoxyif not a hegemonic ideologyin the 1990s. In this New Liberal orthodoxy, liberals and leftists have lost favor with the American electorate because they have moved away from the American people and have become too closely identified with "special interests." These special interests typically are held to include the labor movement, feminists, gays, secularists, civil libertarians, poor people, and nonwhite minorities, especially blacks. The punch line in this narrative is that restoring liberal, or Democratic, credibility requires establishing distance from these supposedly "marginal" constituencies and appealing to a "mainstream" American voter. In this context, mainstream means relatively well-off, white, and male, in some combination or another. Militant devotion to this mainstream is a symbolic meeting ground for several tendencies that rest uneasily within a Democratic Party that has become the institutional home of left-liberal politics since the decline of the activist movements of the 1960s.

From one direction, a neoliberal element would recast liberal politics along lines that break with the Keynesian pragmatism and pluralist public budgeting that has defined the liberal-progressive axis in American politics since the New Deal. This neoliberalism either trumpets the triumph of the market as the ultimate basis of social rationality or insists that challenging the market's hegemony is futilely impolitic, which amounts to the same thing. This strain therefore advocates reducing and privatizing public functionsor, in the Orwellian euphemism coined by David Osborne and operationalized by Vice President Al Gore, "reinventing government"in service to a narrowly market-oriented notion of efficiency and an ideal of fiscal responsibility. Although this neoliberalism often includes support, or at least acceptance, of conventionally liberal stances on such "social issues" as abortion rights, gay rights, environmental protection, or even drug legalization, it retreats from downwardly redistributive social welfare policy, a disposition characteristically justified with a rhetoric stressing fiscal constraint, realpolitik, and the need to direct public policy toward encouraging personal responsibility or "choice."

From a second direction, a communitarian tendency similarly draws on the rhetoric of responsibility, though in service to a more actively coercive social vision. This vision is propelled by a commitment that public policy should enforce, or at least reinforce, putatively majoritarian values. Though it is less self-consciously technocratic than neoliberal critiques, the communitarian tendency is hardly averse to social engineering. Indeed, communitarians may exhibit a firmer faith than even the conventional left-liberals they denigrate that government action can produce specifically virtuous outcomes. Thus, communitarians see public policy as a vehicle for inculcating desired individual values and behavior and therefore often argue for such interventions as limiting income support for impoverished single parents and denying it to single teenaged parents, restricting access to abortion, and toughening divorce laws as mechanisms for strengthening families. The communitarian critique maintains that left-liberal politics has erred in not honoring majoritarian notions of virtue and desert and has alienated its natural base by coddling and rewarding those who fail to honor dominant norms. From this perspective, the draconian turn in criminal justice policyfor example, capital punishment, three-strikes provisions, mandatory sentencing, suspension of the Bill of Rights for residents of low-income public housingand punitive social policy appeal both as deterrents and as signals of good faith to the heretofore affronted majority's sentiments.

From a third direction, a more familiar cohort of conservative, mainly southern Democrats has bristled at the left-egalitarian, sodaily liberal presence in the party all along. This source of tension goes back to the New Deal. Although the black electoral empowerment ensuing from the 1965 Voting Rights Act effectively bolstered the relatively moderate wing of the Democratic Party in the South by driving its most right-wing elements to the GOP, white southern Democratic elites have remained the party's most consistently conservative force. (In this context, after all, "relatively moderate" is defined in relation to reactionaries such as U.S. senators John Stennis and James Eastland in Mississippi, U.S. representative John Rarick and Governor John McKeithen in Louisiana, Georgia's governor Lester Maddox, and South Carolina's senator Strom Thurmond.)

In addition to concerns about black prominence, many conservative southern Democrats are disturbed by the rise of environmentalist, civil libertarian, gay rights, abortion rights, and other feminist constituencies within the party. Even "moderates"a category mainly including those white Democrats who have adapted the familiar style of biracial brokerage politics to the new environmentexpress discomfiture that the Democrats command electoral support of only a minority among whites. (That this formulation does not beg questions as to why an electoral majority of whites, rather than a majority of the general electorate, should be seen as the standard of political health is a revealing aspect of the current discourse.)