Retelling US history

images: Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (from Jill Lepore, These Truths)

People who mostly learned American history through their high school education have a limited view of the topic. It was a view that paid little attention to the concrete social issues of race, gender, or class in American history. Fortunately there is now a very good way of updating our understandings of the history of our country that rebalances our knowledge of the past. Jill Lepore's outstanding 2018 book These Truths: A History of the United States provides crucial reading in these troubled times where racism, nationalism, and sexism are proclaimed at the very top of our government. (The book is also available as an audiobook, read by the author (link).)

The book has many virtues. But most importantly, Lepore shows how the reality and legacy of slavery played a fundamental and debilitating role in the evolving history of the United States, from the writing of the Constitution to the political conflicts preceding the Civil War to the politics of Reconstruction and Jim Crow. The realities of race are an essential part of American history.

More broadly, the book gives a full and broad account of disenfranchisement and discrimination in our history. Native Americans, women, freed slaves, and immigrants all find their voices and their struggles in this book -- not as secondary walk-on characters, but as shapers of history and actors in the narratives that made us the nation we are. Here is a passage early in the book in which Lepore makes clear the intertwining of liberty and slavery before the American Revolution:

Slavery does not exist outside of politics. Slavery is a form of politics, and slave rebellion a form of violent political dissent. The Zenger trial and the New York slave conspiracy were much more than a dispute over freedom of the press and a foiled slave rebellion: they were part of a debate about the nature of political opposition, and together they established its limits. Both Cosby’s opponents and Caesar’s followers allegedly plotted to depose the governor. One kind of rebellion was celebrated, the other suppressed—a division that would endure. In American history, the relationship between liberty and slavery is at once deep and dark: the threat of black rebellion gave a license to white political opposition. The American political tradition was forged by philosophers and by statesmen, by printers and by writers, and it was forged, too, by slaves. (64)

And the issue of slavery continued to be the key dividing political issue through the Civil War, masked under the rhetoric of "states rights":

Southern slave owners, a tiny minority of Americans, amounting to about 1 percent of the population, deployed the rhetoric of states’ rights and free trade (by which they meant trade free from federal government regulation), but in fact they desperately needed and relied on the power of the federal government to defend and extend the institution of slavery. The weakness of their position lay behind their efforts to silence dissent. (223)

There are fascinating turns to the story Lepore tells. One concerns America's most famous poem by its most famous poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1849, and the change he introduced into the final version of the poem. Staunchly anti-slavery, Longfellow was deeply concerned for the fate of the Union.

By 1849, Longfellow, like most Americans who were paying attention, feared for the Republic. He began writing a poem, called “The Building of the Ship,” about a beautiful, rough-hewn ship called the Union. But as he closed the poem, he could imagine nothing but disaster for this worthy vessel. In his initial draft, he closed the poem with these lines: . . . where, oh where, Shall end this form so rare? . . . Wrecked upon some treacherous rock, Rotting in some loathsome dock, Such the end must be at length Of all this loveliness and strength!

But instead of ending on this note of despair and inspired by the political campaign of his friend Charles Sumner under the Free-Soil Party, he wrote: 

Sail on! Sail on! O Ship of State! For thee the famished nations wait! The world seems hanging on thy fate! (259)

Close to the end of the Civil War that Longfellow so dreaded, Lepore quotes the equally poetic and compassionate words of President Abraham Lincoln, from his second inaugural address:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. (304)

The third large part of the book is titled "Of Citizens, Persons, and People", and is very relevant to our current political morass. It tells much of the story of the struggle for full citizenship and voting rights for women, African-Americans, and other disenfranchised Americans. Equally it tells the story of the determined efforts of powerful racist, nationalist, and misogynist parties to prevent this from occurring. And it chronicles the rise of powerful corporations and economic interests which had their own political agendas and which so often worked against the wellbeing of working people.

Finance capitalism had brought tremendous gains to investors and created vast fortunes, inaugurating the era known as the Gilded Age, edged with gold. It spurred economic development and especially the growth of big businesses: big railroad companies, big agriculture companies, and, beginning in the 1870s, big steel companies. (335)

Lepore's account of the rise of populism and its ambiguous relationship to fundamental progressive values is worth the price of the book all by itself, given the ominous turn that populism has taken in the past few years.

Populism entered American politics at the end of the nineteenth century, and it never left. It pitted “the people,” meaning everyone but the rich, against corporations, which fought back in the courts by defining themselves as “persons”; and it pitted “the people,” meaning white people, against nonwhite people who were fighting for citizenship and whose ability to fight back in the courts was far more limited, since those fights require well-paid lawyers. (348)

And the conservative willingness -- even eagerness -- to discredit scientific knowledge emerges as a century-old impulse, not something invented in the climate-change-denial generation. In general, it is striking how consistent the anti-progressive voice is throughout the past century and more, and how deeply it informs the conservative agenda today. Further, it is hard to miss the nationalism and racism that have historically been part of that rhetoric. William Randolph Hearst seems strikingly contemporary, and McCarthyism, Nixon, weaponized media, and the decades-long struggle against universal health care resonate with today's headlines as well.

These Truths is an excellent work of historical synthesis that does not oversimplify, and distinctly does not portray US history as a steady march of progress. It makes it clear, really, that the values of equality, liberty, and mutual respect that many of us value so profoundly have been contested throughout our history, and that durable institutions embodying democracy and equality are still to be made, not simply celebrated.

(A good resource for high school history teachers who want to do a more adequate job of bringing difficult issues of race into their curriculum can be found at Facing History and Ourselves.)

Rob Sellers on recent social psychology

Scientific fields are shaped by many apparently contingent and capricious facts. This is one of the key insights of science and technology studies. And yet eventually it seems that scientific communities succeed in going beyond the limitations of these somewhat arbitrary starting points. The human sciences are especially vulnerable to this kind of arbitrariness, and facts about race, gender, and sexuality have been seen to have created arbitrary starting points in various fields of the social and human sciences.

A case in point is the discipline of social psychology. Social psychology studies how individual human beings are shaped in their behavior by the social arrangements in which they mature and live. And yet all too often it has emerged that researchers in this discipline have brought with them a lot of baggage in the form of their own social assumptions which have distorted the theories and methods they have developed.

Rob Sellers is an accomplished social psychologist at the University of Michigan who has thought deeply about the intersections of race and academic life. He also has an unusual and deep appreciation of the history of his discipline. In this recent interview he discusses the legacies of four important African American social psychologists and their impact on the discipline. His subjects are Claude Steele, James Jackson, James Jones, and Jim Sidanius. He argues that these men, all of the same generation and born in the late 1940s, brought about a crucial reorientation in the ways that social psychologists thought about and studied the lives of black people. They have each had distinguished careers and have overseen large numbers of PhD students. Their influence on social psychology has been very substantial.

The interview is worth watching in its entirety -- I hope there will also be a second interview that pressures some of these issues more fully -- but here are some highlights.

There was an assumption among earlier generations of social psychology that white behavior and experience was normal, and that other identities were abnormal. James Jackson provided a fundamental reset to this presupposition by demonstrating how normal black lives were. This represented something like a paradigm change for the discipline, in that it brought about a fundamental reorientation of the perspectives social psychologists brought to their research.

A parallel assumption in earlier research in social psychology, according to Sellers, was that black lives were somehow "damaged" -- low self-esteem, low ability to cope. Jackson demonstrated that this assumption too was fundamentally wrong. Black individuals performed similarly to whites in accepted tests of self-esteem. And the premise of damage underestimates the dignity and persistent success of African American communities.

Claude Steele contributed to an understanding of differences in performance across major social categories through his theory of stereotype threat (link). As Rob Sellers observes, Steele's experimental research on the effects of stereotypes and presuppositions about differences in capacity between groups has made a very large contribution to both social psychology and the field of education. At the same time, Sellers signals in the interview that he has some hesitations about the magnitude of the effect of stereotype threat (19:45).

Sellers credits James Jones's research on prejudice with making a large difference in which we understand contemporary racism and the experience of being black within a racially divided society. He also made highly original contributions to the study of African-American culture, finding linkages back to West African cultural meanings and practices. Sellers accepts the idea that cultural assumptions and practices can persist for many generations beyond their original setting.

Another common assumption in social psychology was that intergroup conflict (for example, racism) was cultural and historically contingent. Jim Sidanius advanced a general theory, social dominance theory (along with Felicia Pratto), which undertook to explain racism and other forms of intergroup oppression as an evolutionary consequence of competition for resources, including access to reproduction.

Another important observation Sellers makes in the interview is that the men described here, for all their heterodoxy, were pretty mainstream in their scientific behavior. They established their reputations and careers through research that found acceptance in the main journals and institutions of the time. By contrast, another group of black psychologists rejected the mainstream more directly. Sellers described the revolt in 1969 of the Association of Black Psychologists and the competition this engendered between the mainstream APA and the more activist ABP.

One interesting point that comes out of this interview is the depth of Rob Sellers' own knowledge of the social psychology of high-level athletes. His comments about Jackie Robinson are particularly interesting.

The question I hope to pursue in my next conversation with Rob is whether the particular experiences of race that these men had in America in the 1950s as children (in the Midwest) and the 1960s as young adults shaped their scientific ideas in any direct ways. It seems intuitively likely that this was the case. But it isn't possible to easily read off of their work the imprint of the experience of racism in earlier stages of their lives. And yet when we look closely at the biographies of a range of black intellectuals we find a clear imprint of the early experiences on contemporary consciousness. (For illustrations see posts on Ahmad Rahman and Phil Richards; link, link).

The second American revolution

The first American Revolution broke the bonds of control exercised by a colonial power over the actions and aspirations of a relatively small number of people in North America in 1776 -- about 2.5 million people. The second American Revolution promises to affect vastly larger numbers of Americans and their freedom, and it is not yet complete. (There were about 19 million African-Americans in the United States in 1960.)

This is the Civil Rights revolution, which has been underway since 1865 (the end of the Civil War); which took increased urgency in the 1930s through the 1950s (the period of Jim Crow laws and a coercive, violent form of white supremacy); and which came to fruition in the 1960s with collective action by thousands of ordinary people and the courageous, wise leadership of men and women like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When we celebrate the life and legacy of MLK, it is this second American revolution that is the most important piece of his legacy.

And this is indeed a revolution. It requires a sustained and vigilant struggle against a powerful status quo; it requires gaining political power and exercising political power; and it promises to enhance the lives, dignity, and freedoms of millions of Americans.

This revolution is not complete. The assault on voting rights that we have seen in the past decade, the persistent gaps that exist in income, health, and education between white Americans and black Americans, the ever-more-blatant expressions of racist ideas at the highest level -- all these unmistakeable social facts establish that the struggle for racial equality is not finished.

Dr. King's genius was his understanding from early in his vocation that change would require courage and sacrifice, and that it would also require great political wisdom. It was Dr. King's genius to realize that enduring social change requires changing the way that people think; it requires moral change as well as structural change. This is why Dr. King's profoundly persuasive rhetoric was so important; he was able to express through his speeches and his teaching a set of moral values that almost all Americans could embrace. And by embracing these values they themselves changed.

The struggle in South Africa against apartheid combined both aspects of this story -- anti-colonialism and anti-racism. The American civil rights movement focused on uprooting the system of racial oppression and discrimination this country had created since Reconstruction. It focused on creating the space necessary for African-American men and women, boys and girls, to engage in their own struggles for freedom and for personal growth. It insisted upon the same opportunities for black children that were enjoyed by the children of the majority population.

Will the values of racial equality and opportunity prevail? Will American democracy finally embrace and make real the values of equality, dignity, and opportunity that Dr. King expressed so eloquently? Will the second American revolution finally erase the institutions and behaviors of several centuries of oppression?

Dr. King had a fundamental optimism that was grounded in his faith: "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." But of course we understand that only long, sustained commitment to justice can bring about this arc of change. And the forces of reaction are particularly strong in the current epoch of political struggle. So it will require the courage and persistence of millions of Americans to these ideals if racial justice is finally to prevail.

Here is an impromptu example of King's passionate commitment to social change through non-violence. This was recorded in Yazoo City, Mississippi in 1966, during James Meredith's March against Fear.

New understandings of populism

It is apparent, on this first round of the presidential elections in France, that we urgently need to understand better the dynamics and causes of radical populism in democratic polities. What is populism? Why does it have such virulence in the current moment as a political movement? What roles do racism, xenophobia, resentment, and economic fear play in the readiness of ordinary citizens in Europe and America to support radical populist candidates and platforms?

The topic has been the subject of research by very talented investigators over the past twenty years. Several recent books are especially relevant in the current moment. Particularly relevant are Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser's Populism: A Very Short Introduction; Jan-Werner Muller's What Is Populism?; and a recent collection by Social Europe edited by Henning Meyer, Understanding the Populist Revolt. Taken together, the three sources provide an excellent basis for thinking further about the nature of radical populism.

Mudde and Kaltwasser argue that populism differs from other political umbrella terms (socialism, fascism) in one important respect: it is less specific in identifying a well defined ideological program. It is, in their words, "an essentially contested concept". Here are a few of their central ideas:

A more recent approach considers populism, first and foremost, as a political strategy employed by a specific type of leader who seeks to govern based on direct and unmediated support from their followers. It is particularly popular among students of Latin American and non-Western societies. The approach emphasizes that populism implies the emergence of a strong and charismatic figure, who concentrates power and maintains a direct connection with the masses. (kl 677-680)

Beyond the lack of scholarly agreement on the defining attributes of populism, agreement is general that all forms of populism include some kind of appeal to “the people” and a denunciation of “the elite.” Accordingly, it is not overly contentious to state that populism always involves a critique of the establishment and an adulation of the common people. More concretely, we define populism as a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people. (kl 700-705)

This means that populism can take very different shapes, which are contingent on the ways in which the core concepts of populism appear to be related to other concepts, forming interpretative frames that might be more or less appealing to different societies. Seen in this light, populism must be understood as a kind of mental map through which individuals analyze and comprehend political reality. It is not so much a coherent ideological tradition as a set of ideas that, in the real world, appears in combination with quite different, and sometimes contradictory, ideologies. (kl 713-717)

A common thread of populist rhetoric is that the movement is "anti-elitist" and that it speaks on behalf of "the people". Elites, according to populist leaders, have dominated policy and captured the benefits of society; "the people" have been left behind by elites who care nothing for their wellbeing. These tropes make perfect interpretive sense of Trumpism -- the campaign's attack on the media, scientists, politicians, and universities, its virulent personal attacks against Hillary Clinton, and its efforts to divide "the real Americans" from others -- immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, Jews, and urban dwellers. And this is the most important point: by claiming to speak uniquely for "the people", there is an implicit openness to authoritarianism in populist politics.

So what is "not-Populism"? What is a political ideology and movement that falls outside the populist rubric? They identify pluralism as the main rival:

Pluralism is the direct opposite of the dualist perspective of both populism and elitism, instead holding that society is divided into a broad variety of partly overlapping social groups with different ideas and interests. Within pluralism diversity is seen as a strength rather than a weakness. Pluralists believe that a society should have many centers of power and that politics, through compromise and consensus, should reflect the interests and values of as many different groups as possible. Thus, the main idea is that power is supposed to be distributed throughout society in order to avoid specific groups— be they men; ethnic communities; economic, intellectual, military or political cadres, etc.— acquiring the capacity to impose their will upon the others. (kl 733-738)

Mudde and Kaltwasser pay close attention to what seems like the most important current problem: mobilization around populist political agendas.

By mobilization we mean the engagement of a wide range of individuals to raise awareness of a particular problem, leading them to act collectively to support their cause. Overall, three types of populist mobilization can be identified: personalist leadership, social movement, and political party. (kl 1246-1248)

They highlight three kinds of mechanisms of mobilization: social movements, charismatic leaders, and local grassroots organizations. (See an earlier post on work by McAdam and Kloos on racialized social movements in the United States; link.)

What factors lead to success in populist mobilization?

For any political actor to be successful, there has to be a demand for her message. Most populist actors combine populism with one or more so-called host ideologies, such as some form of nationalism or socialism. Although populism is often noted as a reason for their success, many electoral studies instead focus exclusively on the accompanying features, such as xenophobia in western Europe or socioeconomic support for disadvantaged groups in Latin America. This is in part a consequence of the lack of available data at the mass level. Empirical studies of populist attitudes are still in their infancy, but they do show that populist attitudes are quite widespread among populations in countries with relevant populist parties (e.g., Netherlands) and social movements (e.g., the United States) as well as in countries with no relevant populist actors (e.g., Chile). (Kindle Locations 2063-2069)

This passage highlights some of the kinds of messages that populists have deployed to support mobilization -- xenophobia and its cousins, and "nation first!" appeals for economic improvement for "the people". Mudde and Kaltwasser highlight the use of mistrust as a political theme -- "elites" are abusing "the people's" interests and needs, the elites cannot be trusted.  Appeals by populist leaders to fear, mistrust, and resentment of others have proven widespread and durable in numerous countries, including the recent presidential campaign in the United States.

A crucially important question before us is why racist and xenophobic attitudes appear to be becoming more common and more readily mobilized, in Europe and in the United States. Why is the rhetoric of division and hate so powerful in today's politics? Mudde and Kaltwasser do not shed much light on this question; indeed, they barely confront the topic. The terms "hate" and "race" do not appear in the book at all. They address the topic of xenophobia more generally (largely in the context of immigration issues). But they do not consider the more basic question: why is hate such a powerful political theme in the politics of extremist populism?

The other two books mentioned above provide more insight into this question, and I will return to them in a subsequent post.

*     *     *

There is today a little bit of good news for everyone concerned about the ascendancy of extremist populist politics in modern democracies. It appears that political novice and moderate candidate Emmanuel Macron has slightly bested far-right populist Marine Le Pen in today's French election results (23.7% vs. 21.8%, with 96% of polls reported). So the final round will involve a run-off election between the two leading candidates, and almost all commentators agree that the advantage in the second round will go to Macron. So the anxiety felt by many around the world that France would follow Great Britain (Brexit) and the United States (Trump) with an unexpected victory for the extreme right populist position is now much abated.

Divided ...

Why is part of the American electoral system so susceptible to right-wing populist appeals, often highlighting themes of racism and intergroup hostility? Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos address the causes of the radical swing to the right of the Republican Party in Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America. Here is the key issue the book attempts to resolve:

If the general public does not share the extreme partisan views of the political elites and party activists and, more to the point, is increasingly dismayed and disgusted by the resulting polarization and institutional paralysis that have followed from those views, how has the GOP managed to move so far to the right without being punished by the voters? Our answer — already telegraphed above — is that over the past half century social movements have increasingly challenged, and occasionally supplanted, parties as the dominant mobilizing logic and organizing vehicle of American politics. (Kindle location 303-307). 

Not surprisingly given McAdam's long history in the social movements research field, McAdam and Kloos argue that social movements are commonly relevant to electoral and party politics; they suggest that the period of relatively high consensus around the moderate middle (1940s and 1950s) was exceptional precisely because of the absence of powerful social movements during these decades. But during more typical periods, national electoral politics are influenced by both political parties and diffuse social movements; and the dynamics of the latter can have complex effects on the behavior and orientation of the former.

McAdam and Kloos argue that the social movements associated with the 1960s Civil Rights movement and its opposite, the white segregationist movement, put in motion a political dynamic that pushed each party off of its “median voter” platform, with the Republican Party moving increasingly in the direction of white supremacy and preservation of white privilege.

More accurately, it is the story of not one, but two parallel movements, the revitalized civil rights movement of the early 1960s and the powerful segregationist countermovement, that quickly developed in response to the black freedom struggle. (lc 1220)

The dynamics of grassroots social movements are thought to explain how positions that are unpalatable to the broad electorate nonetheless become committed platforms within the parties. (This also seems to explain the GOP preoccupation with “voter fraud” and their efforts at restricting voting rights for people of color.) The primary processes adopted by the parties after the 1968 Democratic convention gave a powerful advantage to highly committed social activists, even if they do not represent the majority of a party's members.

This historical analysis gives an indication of an even more basic political factor in American politics: the polarizing issues that surround race and the struggle for racial equality. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was a widespread mobilization of large numbers of ordinary citizens in support of equal rights for African Americans in terms of voting, residence, occupation, and education. Leaders like Ralph Abernathy or Julian Bond (or of course, Martin Luther King, Jr.) and organizations like the NAACP and SNCC were effective in their call to action for ordinary people to take visible actions to support greater equality through legal means. This movement had some success in pushing the Democratic Party towards greater advocacy of reforms promoting racial justice. And the political backlash against the Democratic Party following the enactment of civil rights legislation spawned its own grassroots mobilizations of people and associations who objected to these forms of racial progress. And lest we imagine that progressive steps in the struggle for racial justice largely derived from the Democratic Party, the authors remind us that a great deal of the support that civil rights legislation came from liberal Republicans:

The textbook account also errs in typically depicting the Democrats as the movement’s staunch ally. What is missed in this account is the lengths to which all Democratic presidents—at least from Roosevelt to Kennedy—went to placate the white South and accommodate the party’s Dixiecrat wing. (kl 411)

The important point is that as long as the progressive racial views of northern liberal Democrats were held in check and tacit support for Jim Crow remained the guiding—if unofficial—policy of the party, the South remained solidly and reliably in the Democratic column. (lc 1301)

So M&K are right -- issues and interests provide a basis for mobilization within social movements, and social movements in turn influence the evolution of party politics.

But their account suggests a more complicated causal story of the evolution of American electoral politics as well. M&K make the point convincingly that the dynamics of party competition by themselves do not suffice to explain the evolution of US politics to the right, towards a more and more polarized relationship between a divided electorate. They succeed in showing that social movements of varying stripes played a key causal role in shaping party politics themselves. So explaining American electoral politics requires analysis of both parties and movements. But they also inadvertently make another point as well: that there are underlying structural features of American political psychology that explain much of the dynamics of both movements and parties, and these are the facts of racial division and the increasingly steep inequalities of income and wealth that divide Americans. So structural facts about race and class in American society play the most fundamental role in explaining the movements and alliances that have led us to our current situation. Social movements are an important intervening variable, but pervasive features of inequality in American society are even more fundamental.

Or to put the point more simply: we are divided politically because we are divided structurally by inequalities of access, property, opportunity, and outcome; and the mechanisms of electoral politics are mobilized to challenge and defend the systems that maintain these inequalities.

Trumpism

What kind of political movement does Donald Trump represent? How did we get here? And what will be needed to defeat this divisive and anti-democratic political agenda?

There is a tendency to see Trump as a bolt out of the blue, an anomaly -- an extraordinary showman who somehow conned just enough voters to gain him the Republican nomination and then to prevail as a minority vote getter with an electoral college majority. But now that we've had a few months to reflect on the election, it seems a little more clear that Trump represents something different and even more worrisome. His presidency is more like an American version of a global phenomenon -- a populist ultra-rightist who has come to power on the strength of a political program of xenophobia, hatred of immigrants, and racism.

The extreme right has made sizable gains in Europe in the past forty years. Pippa Norris provides a summary statistic on the rise of the radical right in Western Europe:

source: Pippa Norris, The Rise of the Radical Right: Parties and electoral competition in postindustrial societies

This graph documents the substantial increase in the electoral strength of the extreme right, more than tripling as a share of the total electorate since 1980. (It is interesting to note that the share of the extreme right declined after 2000.) Populist extreme right parties have become powerful in almost every European country.

The parallels between Trump's most outlandish political messages as an unorthodox campaigner and the political ideology of the European extreme right parties are exact and uncanny. Take first his right-wing populism. Cas Mudde attempted to distill the "populist zeitgeist" of the European extreme right in a 2004 article (link), based on his long study of the extreme right parties of Europe. The match with the Trump campaign is exact. Populism is anti-elitist, and its leaders marshal resentment against "corrupt elites". Mudde writes:

I define populism as an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people. Populism, so defined, has two opposites: elitism and pluralism. (543)

Moreover, populism is fundamentally divisive between "us" and "them":

Opponents are not just people with different priorities and values, they are evil! Consequently, compromise is impossible, as it ‘corrupts’ the purity. (544)

The visceral antagonism whipped up against the Clintons during the Trump campaign illustrate this theme.

So who are the "people" of the populist right? They are the people of the imaginary "heartland":

The concept of the heartland helps to emphasize that the people in the populist propaganda are neither real nor all-inclusive, but are in fact a mythical and constructed sub-set of the whole population. In other words, the people of the populists are an ‘imagined community’, much like the nation of the nationalists. (546)

Further, as Mudde documents for European far-right parties, populist politicians are frequently antagonistic to the media -- with the right-wing populist view that the media serves the interests of the elites, not the heartland. This line of thought has an extensive research literature as well -- for example, Mazzoleni et al, The Media and Neo-Populism: A Contemporary Comparative Analysis. "In the populist mind, the elite are the henchmen of 'special interests'" (561) -- a line of heartland thinking that plays into dark conspiratorial theories and anti-Semitism. (Recall the closing political ad sponsored by the Trump campaign with its strong implications of anti-Semitic innuendo; link.)

Piero Ignazi offered a detailed analysis of extreme right parties based on their core ideologies in 1995 (link). He refers to the summary offered by H.G. Betz:

Betz (1993) has introduced the category of “populist extreme right” on the basis of four elements: a) radical opposition to the cultural and socio-political system, without an overt attack to the system as such; b) the refusal of individual and social equality; c) the defence of the “common man”; d) the emphasis on “common sense”; all these populist parties share racist, authoritarian, anti-women and law and order attitudes. (3) 

These are parties "which appeal to resentments, prejudices and traditional values and offer simplistic and unrealistic solutions to the socio-political problems" (4).

And, as Ignazi observes for European extreme right politicians, much of their rhetoric is directed against traditional political parties themselves (recalling Trump's own war with the GOP establishment during the campaign).

Dissatisfaction towards institutions, parties, the way in which democracy works, the traditional channels of participation and the output of the system in relation to identity and security tend inevitably to feed opposition and/or anti-system parties and, in particular, the extreme right. In fact, only ERPs indicate, while quite vaguely, a new way of channelling of the demands based on populist style. Only ERPs distrust parties as such (even if they build up strong organizations for their own) because they divide the “people” and they pervert the “general will”. Only ERPs offer the electorate a right wing radical alternative to the establishment’s political discourse. (8)

Here again it is impossible to miss the strong parallels that exist between these currents and the rhetoric of the Trump machine.

And, of course, there is racism, xenophobia, and bigotry. Thomas Greven emphasizes the central role played in right-wing populism in Europe in his Friedrich Ebert Stiftung study (link). (Here is a summary of research on the racism underlying the European right; link.) The rise of the extreme right parties in Europe has been driven by nationalism and antagonism to minority groups and immigrants; and the rhetoric of these parties has in turn increased the volume and intensity of popular racism. Racism is normalized.

Group-focused enmity is widespread in Europe. It is weakest in the Netherlands, and strongest in Poland and Hungary. With respect to anti-immigrant attitudes, anti-Muslim attitudes and racism there are only minor differences between the countries, while differences in the extent of anti-Semitism, sexism and homophobia are much more marked. (Intolerance, Prejudice and Discrimination: A European Report; link)

These themes are all too evident in the Trump political agenda, most recently with this week's stunning restrictions on Muslim visitors and refugees and the deliberate choice not to refer to Jewish victims in the annual White House statement commemorating the Holocaust (link).

So we might say that Trumpism is a familiar kind of political movement after all. It is right-wing populism, mobilizing its constituents around racism and bigotry combined with resentment of immigrants, with a pounding message of antagonism towards the institutions and personages of the status quo, including especially the media and government. The white nationalism of Steve Bannon and his intimate role within the Trump administration makes perfect sense.

Making of a Black Panther

images: Rahman as keynote speaker at "Black Men in Unions" Institute, UM-Dearborn, 2012; 

Rahman with Huey Newton at Detroit Metro Airport, 1970

In an earlier post I discussed the path through which an African-American intellectual, Phil Richards, came to have the intellectual profile he has today. Here I will reflect upon the development of another African-American man, born in the same year, who also journeyed from the inner city to a career as an academic, but through a very different route. Ahmad Rahman traveled through life from childhood in Chicago in the 1950s to becoming a Black Panther in Detroit in his teens to becoming a professor of history in adulthood. Rahman presents an interesting contrast with Richards. Ahmad Rahman too was a powerful personality and an intelligent man whose life itinerary and character were shaped by the experience of race and racism in urban America. Ahmad too became a member of the Black intelligentsia. But his itinerary was dramatically different, and his identity as a militant activist was primary.

Rahman grew up in Chicago in the 1950s, but also spent time with his extended family in rural Mississippi throughout his early years. He had ample opportunity to experience the realities of racism and white supremacy throughout his youth. He graduated from high school in Chicago and became involved in the rising mood of Black Power in the southside neighborhoods of the city. He moved to Detroit while still a teen-ager to become an early member of the Black Panther organization there. He spent twenty-one years in prison as part of a life sentence he received after being found guilty of events that occurred during a Black Panther raid on a supposed drug house in Detroit. (He eventually learned that this incident had been engineered by the FBI as part of the COINTELPRO program.) Rahman converted to Islam while in prison as part of a spiritual evolution he describes in an interview in Transformations, mentioned below.

Rahman's life changed dramatically when his life sentence was commuted by Michigan governor John Engler. This took place because of the long-term advocacy of a group of committed liberation activists whose support for Rahman never wavered. Rahman completed an undergraduate degree at Wayne State University while in prison and completed a PhD in history at the University of Michigan in 2002 after his release from prison in 1992. He spent the rest of his life as a professor of history at the Dearborn campus of the University of Michigan, where he had a strong influence on a generation of students. His teaching and course content always embodied the critical edge of his lifetime commitment to black progress, but his radicalism perhaps was transformed into something more patient and persistent. Like Phil Richards, Ahmad too was a friend of mine for a long time. Ahmad died prematurely in 2015 at the age of 63. (Here is a brief bio of Rahman from the Detroit Free Press; link.)

Rahman never published a full memoir, but there are several short sources where he tells some of his story. One is "A Detroit Black Panther's Soldiering Journey with Malcolm X," his account of his time as a Black Power activist in Chicago, a soldier of Malcolm X, and a Black Panther in Detroit in his contribution to Edozie and Stokes, Malcolm X's Michigan Worldview: An Exemplar for Contemporary Black Studies (link). The second is an extensive interview he provided to Hajj Mustafa Ali in Transformations on his journey to Islam while in prison in Michigan (link). And a third source is his essay "Marching Blind: The Rise and Fall of the Black Panther Party in Detroit" in Yohuru Williams and Jama Lazarow's Liberated Territory: Untold Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party.

On reading these brief recollections and recalling many snippets of conversation over the years, it might almost be said that Ahmad was a Black Panther before the term even existed -- as a child, as a teen-ager, as a high school student who reacted viscerally and certainly to the Birmingham bombing, and to the visible bonds of white supremacy and police brutality in Chicago and Mississippi in the early 1960s. Ahmad was of a generation of young men who did not easily accept MLK's advocacy of Gandhian non-violence and who felt that forceful self-defense was entirely legitimate. I don't think this was an unusual point of view among young black men of the generation who came of age in the 1960s, and it seems clear that Ahmad's older brothers had much the same feelings.

Like Richards, Rahman too eventually became an intellectual, a historian who wrote extensively on African and African-American history. His book The Regime Change of Kwame Nkrumah: Epic Heroism in Africa and the Diaspora provides a careful political biography of Nkrumah in the context of pan-African liberation movements. The book used previously unreported government documents to shed new light on the actions of the United States in Africa in the 1960s, including particularly the assassination of Nkrumah. (Some of Rahman's research skills later in life were honed during prison through his efforts to use FOIA documents from the FBI to piece together how the Black Panthers had been undone in Detroit with such efficiency.) But Rahman's pathway to a life as a creator of new knowledge led through activism and profound engagement rather than through a primary interest in knowledge and discovery for its own sake. His scholarship was diligent and rigorous, but it was not disinterested. He almost always had a point to make about racism, power, and inequality, and his academic writing had this character as well. Most fundamentally, he wanted to expose the hidden lineaments of power and white supremacy in order to assist in the struggle for liberation and equality.

Rahman's entire life was oriented by his activism in defense of black equality, security, and dignity. Here are a few episodes from childhood and adolescence that bear this out:

My path to prison began with Malcolm X and what I had heard he had said black people should do after the Ku Klux Klan bomb murdered the four little girls in the 16th Street baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on Sunday, September 15, 1963. (Soldiering Journey, 169) 

Ahmad was then twelve years old, and this violence against black children had a powerful impact on him.

When the Jet magazine my mother bought detailed their slaughter, I searched for strong statements from black leaders that offered something more forceful than prayer to prevent more Sunday morning bombings. As usual, Dr. King had called for us to remain nonviolent and not lose faith in the white man.... This was the first time I had ever disagreed with Dr. King. He was a living saint to everybody I knew. I remember saying that I thought that only monsters could blow up those girls and monsters deserved a stake in their hearts. My playmates, all Baptists like the four murdered girls, nodded in agreement. (170)

It was Malcolm X's response and call to action that caught the young Rahman's admiration.

Now I knew a leader who did not believe it either. I swore that day that whenever Malcolm X formed his army, I would march in their ranks. (171)

Later in the piece Rahman describes an episode during his regular visits to relatives in rural Mississippi in which he makes preparations to use the family's shotgun to protect the house against the Klan. He doesn't specify the year, but June 1964 witnessed the Klan murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi, which is consistent with Ahmad's description of the climate of KKK violence during his visit. If so, Ahmad was thirteen years old. (His great-grandmother was a step ahead of him, having found the shotgun shells and removed them from his sock drawer.)

Here is how Rahman describes the appeal of the Black Panther movement to him in the Transformations interview:

The Black Panther party was then arising as a strong influence among young people in Chicago. I was impressed by their stalwart stance for black community control of the educational, economic, and criminal justice institutions, which affected our lives. During the latter 1960's, statistics revealed that the mainly white Chicago Police Department killed more citizens per capita than did any police department in the United States. Most of the dead were black. The Black Panther Party alone stood up and publicly stated that black people had a right to armed self-defense from racist attack. (Transformations interview)

As a teenager in Chicago Ahmad learned of Fred Hampton's efforts to form a Black Panther branch in Chicago, and he engaged himself with the party. Soon after he went to Detroit to help in the establishment of a Detroit branch as well, and by 1970 he was fully involved in the Detroit Black Panther party. Several episodes of defiance and resistance described in the "Soldiering Journey" piece give a good sense of Rahman's state of mind during this period.

This history demonstrates a number of personal characteristics -- discipline, courage, and an unusual ability to succeed academically in spite of enormous obstacles. Rahman's life in prison reflected the same propensity for activism and resistance to injustice, and he was deeply involved in prisoners' rights organizations inside prison. These qualities certainly affected his development as a historian. The inner peace he learned to cultivate in prison remained with him, and he transformed his urgent desire for progress into a long and sustained commitment to tangible forms of life improvement for young people in Detroit. (I once asked Ahmad what he thought of The Wire. He replied that he had seen too much violence in his life, and he didn't like watching it on television.)

This development seems to make several things clear. First, the boy and adolescent Ahmad had a personality that was strongly keyed to responding forcefully to perceived injustice. And these traits are equally evident in his memories of incidents of coercion against him in Detroit. These same dispositions seemed to be part of his older brother Eddie's character as well. Second, the environments in which he lived -- Chicago and Mississippi -- gave very specific and deep instruction to the young man about the nature of racial injustice and white supremacy surrounding him. Third, Rahman's exposure to ideas mattered a great deal in his development -- to the ideas of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, to the Black Power messages of the early founders of the Black Panther movement, and to the primary texts of resistance and revolution to which he was exposed -- Franz Fanon, Marx, Lenin, Che, Mao. (He once said to me that a smuggled copy of Mao's Little Red Book got him through the ordeal of the first few years in prison.) Finally, none of these influences would have brought about the particular chemistry of the activist-historian-scholar that Ahmad became, without the presence of a powerful intellect, a desire to make sense of the social world that surrounded him, and an active skepticism about status-quo explanations of things. Putting these points together, Rahman's development seems more predictable and logical than Richards'. In spite of the dramatic contingencies that arose in his life history, there seems to be a fairly direct line of development from the twelve-year-old in Chicago trying to make sense of the Birmingham bombings to the activist-scholar of the current decade.

Here is a video interview I did with Ahmad in 2008; link. Readers may also be interested in Lance Hill's historical study of the Deacons for Defense, a predecessor to the Black Panthers in The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. Here is an earlier post on this group (link).

Tilly on moving through history

We have long given up on the idea that history has direction or a fundamental motor driving change. There are no iron laws of history, and there is no fundamental driver of history, whether market, class struggle, democracy, or "modernization." And there is no single path forward into a more modern world. At the same time, we recognize that history is not random or chaotic, and that there are forces and circumstances that make some historical occurrences more likely than others. "Men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing" (Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire). So historical process is both contingent and constrained. (Here are several earlier posts on the contingency and causation in history; link, link, link, link, link.)

One of the most insightful historical sociologists in generations is Charles Tilly. He was also tremendously prolific. His volume Roads From Past To Future offers a good snapshot of some of his thinking about contention, social change, and political conflict from the 1970s through the 1990s. The essays are all interesting (including a summary appreciation by Arthur Stinchcombe). Particularly interesting are two chapters on the routinization of political struggle, "The Modernization of Political Conflict in France" and "Parliamentarization in Great Britain, 1758-1834". But especially worthy of comment is the opening essay in which Tilly tries to make sense of his own evolving ideas about social process and social change. And there are some ideas presented there that don't really have counterparts in other parts of the historical sociology literature. As is so commonly true, Tilly demonstrates his basic ability to bring novelty and innovation to social science topics. 

How do we get from past to future? If we are examining complex processes such as industrialization, state formation, or secularization, we follow roads defined by changing configurations of social interaction. Effective social analysis identifies those roads, describes them in detail, specifies what other itineraries they could have taken, then provides explanations for the itineraries they actually followed. (1)

Especially important here is a distinction that Tilly draws between "degree of scripting" and "degree of local knowledge" to analyze both individual actions and collective actions. He believes we can classify social action in terms of these two dimensions. Figure 1.1 indicates his view of the kinds of action that occur in the four extreme quadrants of this graph -- thin and intense ritual, and shallow and deep improvisation. And he offers the examples of science and jazz as exemplars of activities that embody different proportions of the two characteristics.

figure 1.1. Scripting and local knowledge in social interaction, p. 2

The idea of "scripting" refers to the fact that both individuals and groups often act on the basis of habit and received "paradigms" of behavior in response to certain stylized action opportunities. At one stage in his career Tilly referred to these as repertoires of contentious action. And it reflects the idea that individuals and groups learn to engage in contentious politics; they learn new forms of demonstration and opposition in different periods of history, and repeat those forms over multiple generations.

Local knowledge captures for Tilly the feature of social action that is highly responsive to the actors' intimate knowledge of the environment of contention, and their ability to improvise strategies of resistance in response to the specifics of the local environment. James Scott describes Malaysian peasants who toppled trees in the path of mechanized harvesters (Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance; link), and David Graeber describes the strategies adapted by the Spanish anarchist group Ya Basta! as a means of creating disruption at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec in 2001 (link). In each case actors found novel ways suited to current circumstances through which to further their goals.

Tilly's general point is that historical circumstances are propelled by both these sets of features of action, and that different actions, movements, and conflicts can be characterized in terms of different blends of improvisation and script.

Also important in this chapter is Tilly's advocacy for what he calls "relationalism" in opposition to individualism and systems theory.

Relational analysis holds great promise for the understanding of social processes. Relational analysis takes social relations, transactions, or ties as the starting points of description and explanation. It claims that recurrent patterns of interaction among occupants of social sites (rather than, say, mentally lodged models of social structures or processes) constitute the subject matter of social science. In relational analysis, social causation operates within the realm of interaction. (7)

This seems to be very similar to the point that Elias makes through his theory of "figurational sociology" (link). This is a theme that recurs frequently in Tilly's work, including especially in Dynamics of Contention.

Finally, I find his comments about the inadequacy of narrative as a foundation for social explanation to be worth considering carefully.

Negatively, we must recognize that conventional narratives of social life do indispensable work for interpersonal relations but represent the actual causal structure of social processes very badly; narrative is the friend of communication, the enemy of explanation. We must see that the common conception of social processes as the intended consequences of motivated choices by self-contained, self-motivated actors -- individuals, groups, or societies -- misconstrues the great bulk of human experience. We must learn that culture does not constitute an autonomous, self-driving realm but intertwines inseparably with social relations. (7)

These comments are particularly relevant in response to historians who attempt to explain complex social outcomes as no more than the intersecting series of purposive strategies by numerous actors; Tilly is emphasizing the crucial importance of unintended consequences and conjunctural causation that can only be captured by a more system-level account of the field of change.

And Tilly thinks the two points (relationality and narrative) go together:

Relational analysis meshes badly with narrative, since it necessarily attends to simultaneous, indirect, incremental, and unnoticed cause-effect connections. (9) 

So how does all of this help us think about important events and turning points in our own history? What about the 1965 march from Selma to Birmingham pictured above?

Several of Tilly's points are clearly relevant for historians seeking to contextualize and explain the Selma march. The march itself reflected a well-understood script within the Civil Rights movement, in its organization, chants, and implementation. At the same time the organizers and participants showed substantial local knowledge that was inflected in some of the improvisations involved in the march -- for example, the great distance to be covered. Both script and improvisation found a role on that day. That said, I don't think this analytical distinction is as fundamental as Tilly believes. It is one useful dimension of analysis, but not the key to understanding the event.

Second, a telling of the story that simply presented a narrative of decisions, actions, and interactions of various individuals would seriously misrepresent the march. In order to understand the demonstration and the movement it reflected we need to understand a great deal about the preceding fifty years of race, economics, and politics in the United States and beyond. And we need to understand some of the realities of the Jim Crow race system in place in Alabama at the time. The event does not stand by itself. So we need something like Doug McAdam's excellent Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, 2nd Edition if we are to understand the structural conditions within the context of which the movement and the march unfolded. Simple narrative is not sufficient here -- just as Tilly argues.

And third, this complex demonstration reflects relationality at every level -- leaders, organizations, neighborhoods, and individual participants all played their parts in a complicated interrelated set of engagements.

A different way of putting these points is to say that the Selma march is a single complex event, involving the actions and strategies of numerous actors. It is enormously important and worth focusing on. But it is not a miniature for the whole Civil Rights movement. An adequate treatment of the movement, and a satisfactory understanding of the movement's transformational role in American society, needs to move beyond the events and actions of the day to the larger structures and conditions within which actors large and small played their parts.

Does the framework of script and local knowledge help much in the task of explaining historical change? This scheme seems to fit the swath of historical change that is most interesting to Tilly, the field of contentious politics. It seems less well suited, though, to other more impersonal historical processes -- the rise of global trade, the surge of involuntary migration, or the general trend towards higher-productivity agriculture. In these areas the distinction seems to be somewhat beside the point. What seems more important in Tilly's reflections here are his emphasis on the contingency of a historical sequence, and his insistence on the idea that social actors in relationships with each other are the "doers" of historical change.

Social psychology of largescale hate

 

Many countries are facing a detestable resurgence of racism and ethnic hostility in the current political environment, catalyzed in complicated ways by the refugee crisis in Europe, the Brexit vote in the UK, and the rise of trumpism in the United States. Animosity against black and brown people, immigrants, and Muslims is rising in many countries, and hate crimes and racist acts against excluded groups are on the rise as well. For many observers these developments are as surprising and as worrisome as the rise of virulent nationalism and anti-semitism in Germany in the 1930s -- a new politics of cultural despair (link). We thought perhaps we had moved to a democratic consensus in advanced democracies, moving beyond hatred and nativism, and we plainly have not.

 

What are the social and psychological dynamics at work that have unleashed these dark forces within democracies? (Here is an earlier post on hate; link.) What roles are played in these processes by some of the likely influencers: broadcast and print media, social media, political entrepreneurs with a political interest in cultivating hate and divisiveness, social networks, civic and anti-civic organizations, slow economic growth and mobility for some groups, and the fear of Isis violence around the world?

 

Some of these possible factors are external environmental conditions -- terrorism, economic crisis -- that influence individual political dispositions. Others are structural features of the societies we live in -- freedom of association for hate groups, dense social networks of like-minded people, information diffusion systems like media and transportation. And yet others are features of political intentionality -- leaders who deliberately foster fear, hate, and suspicion for their own political purposes, organizations that mobilize their members around divisiveness and suspicion. 

 

Underlying it all is a profound set of questions about identity and political psychology. What are some key features of individual psychology that play into the dynamics of division and hate within a modern society? Are there common human psychological dispositions that leave people vulnerable to the appeal of hate against other groups in society? Is there a profile of democratic resilience that makes some people more tolerant and positive about their fellow citizens? (This resilience seems to be one of the characteristics deliberately cultivated by architects of European identity; link.) And are there known mechanisms of persuasion and inculcation that play up hate and reduce the impulse to resilience and tolerance -- an effective fascist rhetoric?

 

One such mechanism of social division seems apparent in contemporary events -- lies and aspersions against one group or another by leaders of divisive organizations (IKIP, the Trump campaign). And this in turn seems to reveal a central factor in the dynamics of hate in a mass society: the relative balance of trust and suspicion found in individuals and groups. Trust encourages tolerance and mutual respect; suspicion and fear encourage retrenchment, opposition, and hate. So a leader or party interested in bringing about a politics of hate will find it useful to raise suspicion about the target group.

Another plausible mechanism is the idea that people's thoughts and behaviors are calibrated to "normal", and when public figures begin using more explicitly racist language, ordinary followers begin to drift in that direction as well. (It seems evident that conservatives' public denunciations of President Obama in disrespectful and racist terms since his election in 2008 have loosened a broader public willingness to engage in racist speech as well.) There may be a positive feedback loop in which small racisms breed large racisms. 

 

A fairly compact narrative of the evolution of hate in a particular society might go along these lines, represented in the diagram above. Most individuals have a psychology that is capable of both tolerance and hate. This psychology can be activated in one direction or the other by intentional political actors. Large-scale shift of attitudes requires some external threat that can be exploited by the party of hate. Economic crisis and terrorism can play this role. Hateful messages can be constructed by leaders through a variety of avenues, including public media, covert organizations, and political parties. Skill at framing messages of division and suspicion has the potential of activating latent grievances into active grievances. A few provocative incidents have the potential to create a widening cycle of suspicion, mistrust, and hate. 

 

It seems clear that these processes could be modeled using an agent-based model if we liked; they have much in common with the mechanisms of pandemic disease. The cognitive and emotional processes influencing social trust and social suspicion could be modeled fairly simply as well.

 

The diagram above offers a simple view of a possible causal structure of the emergence of hate in a population. The standing conditions change over time but influence the mindset and dispositions of individuals in the population in a period of time. Individuals are subject to mobilization appeals and messages from leaders and organizations, and they interact with each other. Depending on the contingent contest of messages in the middle of the diagram, a climate of either hate or harmony ensues. 

 

The diagram also gives a basis for a theory of a "public health policies for inclusiveness" -- a set of interventions that could make the emergence of widespread hate less likely. Reduce the footprint of the organizations of hate and intolerance; build confidence across communities in the trustworthiness of each community; undermine and challenge the messages of exclusion and suspicion that are the nuts and bolts of racist mobilization; discredit the leaders of the divisive movement. In a democracy there are clear limits that restrict each of these strategies, but there are certainly legitimate ways of proceeding. 

 

There is a surprising lack of attention to these kinds of social processes within sociology today. Michael Mann's work on murderous ethnic cleansing in The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing is relevant, but the core of Mann's theory doesn't fit very well the situations of Europe or North America today. Moreover, Mann doesn't have a lot to say about the spread of ethnic hostility -- the mechanics of ethnic mobilization -- in the cases he considers in detail. He believes that ethnic cleansing is a modern development, linked with emerging democracies. But he doesn't appear to be interested in the questions of political and cultural psychology -- the ways in which ordinary variations in personal attitudes and beliefs are sometimes transformed into rising levels of suspicion and animosity towards members of other groups in ambient society. 

 

So it seems as though a contemporary sociology of hate, nativism, and nationalism remains to be written. And it is urgent that we turn to that task, given the assaults on liberal, inclusive cosmopolitan communities currently underway in Britain, Western Europe, India, and the United States. 

 

LBJ's commitment to cities

In the United States we have been in the desert for decades when it comes to big, transformative policy reforms aimed at addressing our most serious social issues. But the 1960s marked a decade of vigorous national effort to address some of our most serious and difficult social problems -- racial discrimination, war, poverty, education, and the quality of life of poor children and the elderly. It is worth thinking back to the large ambitions and strategies that were adopted between 1960 and 1968, the election of Richard Nixon.

A very interesting place to begin is Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, and especially his 1968 Special Message to the Congress on Urban Problems: "The Crisis of the Cities." (link). Martha Bailey and Sheldon Danziger's volume Legacies of the War on Poverty provides a rigorous specialist assessment of the achievements (and shortcomings) of the war on poverty. Johnson's message is powerful in each of its rhetorical components -- aspiration, diagnosis, and policy recommendations.

The document paints a high-level picture of the way in which cities had developed in the United States in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. And the narrative for the 20th century builds to a sense of deepening urban crisis.  

We see the results dramatically in the great urban centers where millions live amid decaying buildingswith streets clogged with traffic; with air and water polluted by the soot and waste of industry which finds it much less expensive to move outside the city than to modernize within it; with crime rates rising so rapidly each year that more and more miles of city streets become unsafe after dark; with increasingly inadequate public services and a smaller and smaller tax base from which to raise the funds to improve them.

The document identifies a host of key problems in American cities: inner-city youth with limited education and opportunity; violent crime; deep penetration of prejudice and discrimination in the normal workings of social life; poor public health levels; and disaffection among inner city citizens, both young and old.

The city will not be transformed until the lives of the least among its dwellers are changed as well. Until men whose days are empty and despairing can see better days ahead, until they can stand proud and know their children's lives will be better than their own -- until that day comes, the city will not truly be rebuilt.

The document emphasizes both material and psychological factors -- poor housing and "empty and despairing" lives. Johnson links the crisis of cities with the goals and achievements of the fundamental Civil Rights legislation of the recent past. 

Johnson's urban policy recommendations focus on several key city-centered crises: poor housing, inadequate public mass transit, extensive urban blight, high unemployment for young people, and institutions supporting lending and insurance for urban homeowners. The document also recommends increased support for urban-centered social-science research. 

What is most noteworthy is the overall ambition of Johnson's agenda: the goal of devoting substantial organizational effort at the federal level (through the establishment of new agencies like HUD) and billions of dollars to implement effective solutions for these awesomely difficult and important social problems. It is striking that we have not had national leaders since LBJ with the courage and vision to set such an ambitious agenda for progressive social change. The persistent problems of poverty, race, and educational failure will be amenable to nothing less. 

There is one other aspect of Johnson's message that is of interest here -- the sociology of knowledge implications of the document. This is a good example of a place where an STS approach would be helpful. There is probably an existing literature on the policy expertise that underlay Johnson's reasoning in this document, but I haven't been able to identify the person who drafted this message on Johnson's behalf. But there is obviously a high level of expertise and judgment implicit in this document -- and this certainly doesn't derive from the president himself. What is the paradigm of urban theory and policy that drives the reasoning of the document and the associated policy proposals? And what are the blindspots associated with that historically situated research framework? Causes, outcomes, and levers of change for urban decline are all identified. Are these still credible as empirical theories of urban realities?

The Kerner Commission report

The Kerner Commission released its report in 1968, following months of intensive study of the series of major race riots and rebellions that had occurred in 1967. Here is the executive summary (link), and here is a detailed review of the context and reception of the report in Boston Review (link).

It is enormously important for us today, almost fifty years later, to reread the report with an eye to the diagnosis the commissioners arrived at -- the underlying structural and experiential conditions that had set the stage for 164 riots, rebellions, and disturbances across the country during 1967 -- and the recommendations they made for healing these fundamental contradictions within our American democracy. Newark and Detroit were the most destructive during 1967, but there were many others during that year, and equally destructive uprisings took place in many major American cities in the following year as well. The Commission's "most basic conclusion" is stark, unblinking, and profoundly troubling: "This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal."

The Commission was careful and deliberate in its assessments of causation of individual rebellions, and they identified broad standing conditions as crucial parts of the causal pathway to the eruption of violence:

Disorder did not erupt as a result of a single "triggering" or "precipitating" incident. Instead, it was generated out of an increasingly disturbed social atmosphere, in which typically a series of tension-heightening incidents over a period of weeks or months became linked in the minds of many in the Negro community with a reservoir of underlying grievances. At some point in the mounting tension, a further incident-in itself often routine or trivial-became the breaking point and the tension spilled over into violence.

"Prior" incidents, which increased tensions and ultimately led to violence, were police actions in almost half the cases; police actions were "final" incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders.

What the rioters appeared to be seeking was fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens. Rather than rejecting the American system, they were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it.

(6)The report considers the nature of the grievances and demands that motivated participants in these uprisings, and classifies them according to urgency:

First Level of Intensity 

1. Police practices
2. Unemployment and underemployment
3. Inadequate housing 

Second Level of Intensity 

4. Inadequate education
5. Poor recreation facilities and programs
6. Ineffectiveness of the political structure and grievance mechanisms 

Third Level of Intensity 

7. Disrespectful white attitudes
8. Discriminatory administration of justice
9. Inadequacy of federal programs
10. Inadequacy of municipal services
11. Discriminatory consumer and credit practices
12. Inadequate welfare programs

The Commission report is also explicit about the severity of the gap between black and white citizens with respect to crucial elements of life quality:

Social and economic conditions in the riot cities constituted a clear pattern of severe disadvantage for Negroes compared with whites, whether the Negroes lived in the area where the riot took place or outside it. Negroes had completed fewer years of education and fewer had attended high school. Negroes were twice as likely to be unemployed and three times as likely to be in unskilled and service jobs. Negroes averaged 70 percent of the income earned by whites and were more than twice as likely to be living in poverty. Although housing cost Negroes relatively more, they had worse housing--three times as likely to be overcrowded and substandard. When compared to white suburbs, the relative disadvantage is even more pronounced. (7)

To this list of racial gaps we must now add the health disparities gap, including disparities by race in infant mortality, disease incidence, and longevity.

And consider these troubling observations about hopes and expectations by young African-American men and women that the Commission discovered. These lines were intended to describe conditions in the late 1960s; but they have great relevance for today's environment in many American cities:

Frustrated hopes are the residue of the unfulfilled expectations aroused by the great judicial and legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the dramatic struggle for equal rights in the South.

A climate that tends toward approval and encouragement of violence as a form of protest has been created by white terrorism directed against nonviolent protest; by the open defiance of law and federal authority by state and local officials resisting desegregation; and by some protest groups engaging in civil disobedience who turn their backs on nonviolence, go beyond the constitutionally protected rights of petition and free assembly, and resort to violence to attempt to compel alteration of laws and policies with which they disagree.

The frustrations of powerlessness have led some Negroes to the conviction that there is no effective alternative to violence as a means of achieving redress of grievances, and of "moving the system." These frustrations are reflected in alienation and hostility toward the institutions of law and government and the white society which controls them, and in the reach toward racial consciousness and solidarity reflected in the slogan "Black Power." (9)

The second point is particularly salient today in a political environment in which racial antagonisms have been encouraged by leading presidential candidates, and an encouraging nod has been offered to adherents willing to use violence against peaceful demonstrators at political rallies.

The report's observations about failures of public school systems in segregated cities are particularly relevant to the city of Detroit, and a partial explanation of the growing sense of separation between white and black Michiganders and between Detroit and Lansing:

Education in a democratic society must equip children to develop their potential and to participate fully in American life. For the community at large, the schools have discharged this responsibility well. But for many minorities, and particularly for the children of the ghetto, the schools have failed to provide the educational experience which could overcome the effects of discrimination and deprivation.
This failure is one of the persistent sources of grievance and resentment within the Negro community. The hostility of Negro parents and students toward the school system is generating increasing conflict and causing disruption within many city school districts. But the most dramatic evidence of the relationship between educational practices and civil disorders lies in the high incidence of riot participation by ghetto youth who have not completed high school.

What have the succeeding five decades brought us? The twelve sources of grievance listed above are entirely relevant to today's realities in Detroit, Chicago, or Cleveland. Youth unemployment, crisis conditions in public school systems, highly visible and recurring instances of excessive use of deadly force by police across the country, and ineffective political institutions are high on the list today in African-American communities in virtually all large American cities, including especially Detroit.

If we are honest about the facts of race in America, it is hard to claim that there is substantial progress in the key concerns of the Kerner Commission report. Here is one key finding in 1967: "Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans." And in cities throughout the United States, this devastating reality persists. Racial residential segregation continues; there are continuing racial gaps in education, health, employment, and quality of life; and there continues to be a pattern of police violence against young black men. And, predictably, there is a rising level of anger and disaffection among many millions of young people whose lives are limited by these basic facts. We need to re-read the Kerner Commission report; and we need to act on its wise recommendations.