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

“making work pay” could unite a struggling middle class with a working class that cannot build a decent
quality of life for themselves and their children strictly through their wages at work.

Yet the ideological, “raced” legacy of the right's attack upon a dying Keynesian liberalism

remains considerable. One only need consider how denigrated public provision and progressive taxation
is in the eyes of most Americans. Thus, the ideological, if not electoral, hegemony of the right may be
so great that the nation will not even see a modicum of health care reform in the next decade, despite
the obvious crisis in both coverage and cost. Even at the end of the Clinton administration, amidst
(ever-so-brief) rosy predictions of massive budget surpluses, did mainstream Democratic politicians
address our desperate need for increased expenditure on fraying infrastructure, public education, job
training, and child and health care. Few can remember the platform of the 2000 Gore campaign – all it
promised was the continuation of Clinton-era prosperity (i.e., it hoped to preserve the uptick in the
business cycle!). If in 1970 Richard Nixon declared "we are all Keynesians now," by the eve of the
millennium the hard-learned lessons that deficit spending is often a virtue faded with memories of the
Great Depression. The obsessive fear of higher taxes (and a complete disbelief that taxes could be
structured in a progressive manner), plus an absence of faith in the capacity of government remains
quite pervasive among swing white middle-strata voters. In an interview with Business Week in the fall
of the 2000 campaign, Al Gore said that if there were a recession he would “raise taxes” in order to
balance the budget. Thus, was buried any restant Keynesian policy knowledge within Democratic party
elites.

But this “raced” ideological hostility to progressive taxation and public provision cannot be successfully
"end-runned" by either neo-liberal or social democratic appeals to a race-blind, universalist politics of
rights and responsibilities. The long-term war of position for the democratic left must explicitly combat
the racist debasement of the public sector and the loss of popular faith in the ability of the democratic
state to provide those public goods necessary for citizens to live independent lives in civil society. That
is, there is no way to deracialize American politics through a universal politics of citizenship when the
very concept of citizenship is contested and constructed on the terrain of racial discourse and
perceptions. On the other hand, contrary to the implicit strategy of some advocates of a "politics of
difference," social change cannot be achieved solely by the mobilization of oppressed constituencies.

The real challenge for democratic activists and intellectuals is not that of choosing between a

false antinomy between unity and diversity (or universality and difference), but of reconstructing a
politics of pluralist democratic solidarity. While a house divided may not stand, a class-and-race divided
nation may also not be able to resuscitate itself. The right-wing program of a politics of privatization
and policing of the inner cities may not preclude economic distress, nihilism, and crime from visiting
suburban white working class and middle class enclaves. But whether or not this occurs, there is no
teleological guarantee that the political response to increasing social dislocation among the middle-third
of American society will be progressive. Such an outcome will be determined by what we do politically
and intellectually in regards to contesting the racial construction of American politics.