Liberalism Is Not Enough: Race and Poverty in Postwar Political Thought

Liberalism Is Not Enough

Liberalism Is Not Enough

Race and Poverty in Postwar Political Thought

Robin Marie Averbeck

The University of North Carolina Press    CHAPEL HILL

© 2018 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Averbeck, Robin Marie, author.

Title: Liberalism is not enough : race and poverty in postwar political thought / Robin Marie Averbeck.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2018]

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018011166| ISBN 9781469646633 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469646640 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469646657 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Liberalism—United States—History—20th century. | Equality—United States—History—20th century. | Poor—United States—Social conditions—20th century. | Poverty—United States—History—20th century. | African Americans—United States—Social conditions—20th century.

Classification: LCC JC574.2.U6 .A79 2018 | DDC 320.51/3097309046—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011166

For Beazie

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

The Drinking Water

CHAPTER TWO

Diagnosing Poverty

CHAPTER THREE

A Culture of Poverty

CHAPTER FOUR

Building the Blame

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Liberalism Is Not Enough

Introduction

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

—WILLIAM FAULKNER

On June 4, 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson delivered the commencement address at Washington, D.C.’s Howard University, a historically black university named after the first director of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Johnson told his audience that they represented the hopeful future of African Americans—educated and middle class. Yet, their story was not the norm. Even though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was working to secure African Americans’ hard-won freedoms, and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was imminent, for the great majority of Negro Americans—the poor, the unemployed, the uprooted, and the dispossessed, Johnson said, there is a much grimmer story. African American young men were more likely to be out of work; African American babies were more likely to die from infant mortality. Poverty itself, Johnson argued, accounted at least in part for these conditions—for African Americans, like other poor Americans, remained trapped in inherited, gateless poverty. Yet there was something else going on as well, something more subtle and difficult to trace. For Negro poverty is not white poverty, Johnson admitted. African Americans endured a poverty shaped by hundreds of years of racial oppression—oppression that had taken its toll by closing doors and scarring souls.¹

In order to truly address such oppression, Johnson argued, mere equality of opportunity would not suffice. Hindered by the legacy of racism, African Americans needed additional assistance in their struggle to climb the ladder of social mobility. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains, Johnson declared, and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Therefore, the goal Americans needed to set for themselves now was not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result. Thus Johnson laid the foundations for the liberal justification of affirmative action and other federal policies that aimed at equalizing the competitive race for African Americans.²

Johnson’s speech at Howard University is often cited nostalgically. Those were the days, it is lamented, when liberals stood bravely for ensuring that the American dream of social mobility extended to all Americans. Can you imagine President Obama referring to 200 years of slavery? asked Bernard Anderson, an economist who attended Johnson’s speech at Howard University, from the vantage point of 2013. I cannot imagine him saying anything like that.³ This was the spirit, it is often claimed, that animated Johnson’s War on Poverty—a war that launched the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), created the Community Action Program, and sought to bring relief to poor black communities. While today’s Democrats tepidly defend affirmative action, liberals in the 1960s championed the importance of ensuring equality of result. But then the rise of the New Right squelched the spirit of liberal reform, and America retreated from its historical mission to extend the blessings of affluence to all citizens.⁴

This nostalgia rests on little evidence. At the height of its powers and popularity, Great Society liberalism never attempted a sustained, serious attack on the sources of racial inequality and injustice. Its most notable achievements—the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act—came only after the unrelenting and unprecedented resistance strategies of black Americans made continuing the status quo politically undesirable for the Democratic Party and other elites. But the logic that compelled liberals to commit themselves to the political and legal equality of black people could not compel them to also attack the sources of social inequality. These sources were nothing less than the underlying economic and political structures of the nation—regarded by liberals as the best the world had ever seen. Rather than questioning them, they built an ideology in the postwar years to defend them against critiques from the Right and the Left.

This book is an intellectual history of how liberals built this defense in the face of entrenched social injustice. Of course, the full story extends at least as far back as the Progressive Era and ultimately to the foundations of liberalism itself. Yet in the years following World War II, the horrors of the Holocaust, the demands of the Cold War, and the growth of the middle class in America led to a specific formation of liberal principles. Scholars and intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., David Riesman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and others drafted a blueprint of liberalism open to the end of Jim Crow yet also committed to racial capitalism.

By racial capitalism, I refer to the argument of Cedric J. Robinson and others that the development, organization and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions.⁵ In other words, modern racism and capitalism did not develop separately, let alone antagonistically, but rather reinforced and buttressed the logic of each other. Such an understanding of racial capitalism gives precedence to the material conditions and structures of power within which the beneficiaries and victims of racial capitalism lived. Moreover, I work with a definition of racism markedly different from the commonly received and narrow understanding embraced by most Americans across the political spectrum. Rather than referring simply to a conscious, enthusiastic embrace of white supremacy, racism also functions through political and economic structures that favor white people over all others, while appearing on the surface as officially nondiscriminatory.⁶ These are the structures and practices that liberals rose to defend against radical critique from the Black Left. From this perspective, liberalism and conservatism appear not so much as diametrically opposed antagonists, but as political philosophies that occupy the same territory of racial capitalism but offer competing justifications and defenses for its hierarchies.

These commitments became particularly clear when the civil rights movement challenged core assumptions of liberalism in the mid- to late 1960s, demanding social equality that extended past desegregation and the ballot box and radicalizing many in the black freedom movement. In response, the same liberal intellectuals pivoted to delegitimizing the American Left, while a crop of new commentators—such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer—rose to lead the counterassault. Key to this attack was the concept of a culture of poverty, an idea associated today mostly with the Right but one originally built and popularized by liberals.

The liberal political theory that undergirded this process goes by many names. The consensus school refers to a historical tradition that emphasized the hegemony of liberalism in American history. The ideal of a vital center, popularized by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., captured a vision of a vigorous liberalism that could stand up against totalitarianism on the Left and the Right. Pluralism, however, is the term I will be using here to refer to the cluster of assumptions and values that political scientists, sociologists, policy experts, politicians, and commentators drew from when confronting the key social problems of the postwar period. The basic tenets of pluralism were initially the product of political scientists such as David Truman and Robert Dahl, but sociologists David Riesman, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Bell worked to make these core arguments accessible to a broader public.⁷ Political pluralism refers to the shape the official tenets of liberalism took in the postwar period. Therefore, although I will usually use the word pluralism when discussing the contributions of academics active in constructing this body of thought, the term is roughly interchangeable with the term liberalism when applied to a broader public understanding.

Until recently, scholars of the postwar period have not often associated the politics of poverty with pluralism. On the contrary, Johnson’s War on Poverty and its controversial community action programs have been depicted as pushing back against the decontextualized assumptions of pluralist scholars, who almost entirely ignored race and, believing postwar affluence had solved the economic problems of capitalism, considered poverty to be a small problem of merely mopping up remaining puddles.⁸ This interpretation results from confusing the ideas and intentions of local community action activists with those of the liberal intellectuals and architects responsible for developing and implementing federal policy. Some employees of the Office of Economic Opportunity did aim to rock the boat and genuinely hoped for the political participation of the poor.⁹ Yet their numbers were few, and their influence has been overstated.¹⁰ When examined more closely, it becomes clear how deeply liberal poverty policy was steeped in pluralist political thought, and how little War on Poverty programs did to address the sources of black poverty.

The color of poverty—to steal a phrase from Jill Quadagno’s book The Color of Welfare—played a central role in the development of pluralist thinking on poverty. Although pluralist thinkers rarely discussed the history of racist oppression in America—and when they did they often glanced at it indirectly through the lens of ethnicity—the political theory that informed the thinking of scholars, politicians, and pundits was saturated with white supremacy.

Pluralist thinkers seldom directly discussed race, making excavation of the racial content in their work a challenge. I argue, however, that this silence itself indicates the presence of whiteness, as their failure to incorporate the history of racism should not be regarded as either normative or expected. With inspiration and assistance from Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s work on silencing the past, I strive to identify the unstated but crucial racial content in pluralist ideology even before the civil rights movement forced white intellectuals to confront race directly.¹¹ Once this confrontation occurred, however, the racial content of liberal commentary became increasingly evident, ultimately resulting in the idea of a culture of poverty. This applied even when the intellectuals involved were not white, although they usually were. As postcolonial theory teaches us, the ideology of white supremacy permeates not only those it benefits but members of the oppressed race as well.¹² Even black thinkers committed to antiracism, as Ibram X. Kendi reminds us in his 2016 analysis of W. E. B. Du Bois, could participate in tropes and assumptions ultimately linked to the conclusion that, as he puts it, something is wrong with Black people.¹³

This book therefore joins the tradition of scholarship that argues that racism is inherent to American liberalism. Rather than being understood as a contradictory element of or a cancerous growth on the principles of individual liberty and autonomy, white supremacy supplied a key ingredient to liberalism from the beginning. This view is rooted in a historical perspective that refuses to view the interwoven development of liberalism and white supremacy as either coincidences or growing pains. As scholar Jennifer L. Hochschild writes, Liberal democracy and racism in the United States are historically, even inherently, reinforcing; American society as we know it exists only because of its foundation in racially based slavery, and it thrives only because racial discrimination continues. The apparent anomaly is an actual symbiosis.¹⁴ I also argue that, in addition to this relationship with white supremacy, any historically coherent interpretation of liberalism understands it as an ideology birthed by, and resolutely committed to, capitalism. Despite liberalism’s more social democratic variations and the undeniable diversity of liberal political thought, the core values of individualism and decontextualized civil liberties are attached at the hip to a capitalist environment.

The term commitment is particularly important here. Too often, critiques of American liberalism discuss its content in terms of limits—these often invoke images of a wall that prevents liberalism from reaching some other destination, implying the presence of negative factors blocking its full development or destiny.¹⁵ Yet liberalism remains in the center of the political spectrum not as a result of negative forces of prevention, but by virtue of its own positive commitments to capitalism and white privilege. In other words, the appropriate metaphor for why liberalism failed to seriously address black poverty in the postwar era is not a wall, but rather an anchor. Liberals actively cast down their anchor where they are. The history of the Great Society displays this decision clearly: at the height of their influence and political power, postwar liberals ultimately pushed back against the Black Freedom Movement—not to mention anticolonial movements abroad. I argue that we should understand postwar liberalism as fundamentally reactionary, pivoting to tell history to stop, as conservative William F. Buckley put it, just as the emergent New Right trumpeted the same call.¹⁶

Political developments since the 1960s have made this difficult to recognize. The rise of the Right, inaugurated by Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, has produced a distortion in political memory about liberalism. Historians, hoping to decipher the wave of right-wing politics, unintentionally contributed to this trend. In a now-famous 1994 article entitled The Problem of American Conservatism, Alan Brinkley called for scholars of American history to turn their attention to American conservatism.¹⁷ Historians responded with an overwhelming profusion of studies on the Religious Right, the Libertarian Right, neoconservatives, anticommunism, conservative youth groups, conservative intellectuals, suburban housewives, key conservative politicians, and family values. These studies have contributed immensely to our understanding of conservatism, and much of this scholarship corrected for the assumptions of the postwar consensus school scholars—who argued that liberalism had always dominated American political culture—rightly placing a thriving conservative tradition back at the center of American culture.

Yet in their quest to explain American conservatism, scholars of American history have overlooked the central role of liberalism in setting the stage for the rise of the New Right. This occurred despite a quest for origins—a wondering at whence conservative politics came—that characterizes many of the studies on the success of the Right in recent decades. Many scholars experienced surprise and distress as right-wing politics became ever more reactionary and ever more electorally successful. As political scientist Naomi Murakawa writes, With eyes fixed on the incendiary sins of conservative law-and-order, liberal agendas become contrast background, glossed quickly and presumed virtuous. Accounts of conservative backlash are not wrong; rather, I believe that they are so overwhelmingly persuasive that they eclipse the specificity of racial liberalism against which they respond.¹⁸ Distracted by the shock and awe of New Right politics, scholars passed over the conditions in which it emerged, failing to recognize that, as Murakawa puts it, it is the ‘backdrop’ to conservative racialization that warrants study, every bit as much as explicitly conservative and reactionary traditions.¹⁹

That backdrop—postwar liberalism—in many ways fertilized the soil from which the conservative movement emerged. Indirectly, scholars have indeed noted this from time to time—as Brinkley has recently reminded us, the liberal creed remains one that even many conservatives, if they thought about it, might agree with.²⁰ Until recently, however, there has been little recognition of the implication of this similarity—rather than flourishing far away from conservatism, American liberalism represents a branch on the same family tree.²¹ This perspective enables us to return to an understanding of liberalism as historically rooted in, and committed to, racial capitalism, making far less mysterious such famous missed opportunities as the New Deal or the Great Society.

The political discussion swirling around race and poverty in the 1960s that I explore in this book offers a clear example of this dynamic, as mostly liberals, not conservatives, developed the idea of a culture of poverty that later became so central to Republican talking points about the black poor. What liberals