(Page 2 of 25) - Racism, Difference, and the Problematic Politics of Social Solidarity authored by Schwartz, Joseph.

This paper analyzes how the right has utilized the politics of race to erode popular support for

social rights and public provision. As a social theorist whose work examines the role ideology plays in
political development, I find that much of contemporary political science has eschewed the investigation
of "race" as a crucial ideological and normative concept within political life. Postmodern and cultural
studies theorists have been less guilty of this "marginalization" of race, but have subjected race to a
"discursive" analysis that overemphasizes the "performative" aspects of racial identity at the expense of
comprehending the less malleable – and more material -- political, economic, and institutional
construction of racial identity.

This investigation of the politics of race and inequality is part of a forthcoming book manuscript

which explores the political and moral avenues for revitalizing a democratic, solidaristic politics in an
age of globalization, increased social differentiation, and declining support for public provision.

earlier book, The Permanence of the Political, argued that the radical tradition's longing for a post-
political society instantiating a comprehensive set of universal "true human interests” led that tradition
to devalue the role of pluralism and politics in a good society.

The core argument of this next book, in

contrast, cautions against a new radical "postmodern" orthodoxy of uncritically embracing the value of
"difference" at the very moment when inegalitarian conceptions of gender, racial, and ethnic plurality
have been appropriated by the right as an ideological justification for attacking social solidarity and
equality.

Beginning with Nixon, Thatcher, and Reagan, the right has engaged in a "social construction" of

a "white" (or, in European terms, "English," "French," "German," etc.) identity, which contends that the
egalitarian project of the left discriminates against hard-working "whites" in favor of people of color or
immigrants who do not play by the overarching national community's rules of the game -- the "work
ethic" (narrowly defined as full-time participation in the formal labor market). While this paper will
allude to the role that the politics of race has played both in the decomposition of the New Deal
coalition and in support for public provision, I will not reconstruct a narrative that should be familiar to
most.

A revived democratic political project will need to mediate the tension between the politics of

racial identity (including, at times, forms of cultural nationalism) integral to mobilizing oppressed
communities of color and the politics of multi-racial solidarity necessary for majoritarian social reform.
My contribution attempts to develop a normative and empirical argument which while sympathetic to
some "post-modern" insights, holds, in contrast, that an emancipatory politics cannot be built solely

Joseph M. Schwartz, The Future of Democratic Equality: Rebuilding Social

Solidariy in a Fragmented United States (New York: Routledge, summer 2006,
forthcoming).

See Joseph M. Schwartz, The Permanence of the Political: A Democratic Critique
of the Radical Impulse to Transcend Politics, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1995).

For a thorough-going account of the role that conservative political

manipulation of the politics of race played in the decomposition of the
momentary Great Society coalition see Thomas and Mary Byrne Edsall, Chain
Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Taxes, (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1991). While I accept much of their descriptive analysis, I take
issue, as demonstrated below, with their prescription that the Democratic Party
can escape the dilemma of being defined as the party of minorities and "special
interests" simply by adapting a universal, social democratic economic program.