Post-Liberalism and the New Discourse on Race

Traditional liberal and social-democratic attempts to address problems such as racism and poverty have worked within the framework of what we could call “universalizing” categories: “equal opportunity,” “equality under the law,” “full employment,” “guaranteed income,” etc. That is, the strategies of traditional liberal and social democratic reformism were predicated on the development of general, inclusive, social standards, and then attempting to change existing institutions in accord with those standards. Whatever the failures of these strategies, it is in these terms that they must be evaluated.

The neo-conservative counter-revolution has undermined this framework and the liberal agenda which has depended upon it. The conservative reaction of the 1980s has argued that only the government (the only institution with centralized power) can set and enforce such standards; that for the government to do so is “unjust,” since it would violate the freedom of individuals and the beneficial workings of the free market; that such attempts therefore lead to “tyranny,” that is, centralized control and social engineering carried out by a bureaucratic elite; and finally, that such attempts are anyway inherently inefficient and wasteful, since human needs and abilities are inherently heterogeneous and unpredictable, and therefore cannot be organized or coordinated in any meaningful way.

The hegemony of these arguments remains intact, even if the credibility of the neo- conservative ability to offer solutions to the social problems of poverty, inequality and racism has been severely eroded. This is because the neo-conservative regimes have not only argued against liberal programs, but they have also attacked and substantially weakened the institutional supports of these programs and the allocative priorities which governed them.

In the context of this changed environment and the loss of credibility of the right, erstwhile liberals are again proposing alternative ways of addressing these problems which, if anything, are more acute now than they were during the 1960s. In fact, conditions are now especially favorable to “new” liberal arguments, those which combine traditional liberal rhetoric of equality and justice with demonstrations that liberals have learned the lessons taught by neo-conservatism about the “evils” of “big government.” In other words, liberals, or at least their political descendants, are poised to recapture the center of mainstream American political discourse—as can be seen in the (so far) apparently successful Clinton campaign. In the interests of developing genuine alternatives to capitalist crisis-management (whether liberal or conservative), it is therefore necessary to examine and critique these “new” discourses, as they are in the process of consolidating themselves and struggling for hegemony.

One particularly articulate representative of the “new” or “post” liberal views on race and poverty is New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley. In a speech given on March 26, 1992 on the floor of the Senate, reprinted in the Syracuse Herald American on July 12, and virtually reproduced in his address to the Democratic Convention (“Time for Truth, Time for Action”), Bradley established what I will call a “post-liberal” paradigm for talking about race.

Bradley begins by reiterating that the “race problem” is above all a problem of the injustice inflicted upon African Americans, first of all through the institution of slavery: “Slavery was America’s original sin, just as race remains our unsolved dilmma.” He furthermore notes that this is not simply a “historical” problem (for example, in the sense that, due to slavery and segregation, blacks simply got off to a “bad start” in the american game of upward mobility) but one rooted in contemporary realities: “Even though our American future depends on finding common ground, many white Americans resist relinquishing the sense of entitlement skin color has given them throughout our national history.” This understanding of the historical and social dimensions of the problem of race would, one would assume, lead to the following conclusion: at long last, justice must be done to African Americans, and the necessary resources must be channeled into persuading or compelling white Americans to surrender the privileges racism has provided them with.

However, Bradley does not develop the argument in this direction. Rather, he establishes another paradigm for understanding the problem. Due to his experience as a professional basketball player, Bradley claims that he was able to see New York City not only through his own (white, liberal) eyes, but through the eyes of his black teammates. In other words, Bradley’s basketball career can become an allegory of the production of the “new” post-liberal discourse on race out of a combination of diverse, heterogeneous viewpoints. This combination allows us to see stark, apparently simply realities in more “complex” ways—this point is important because this notion of “complexity” and “difference” will be central to Bradley’s articulation of the problems of the inner cities.

What Bradley was able to see, on this account, through this “double vision” his situation accorded him, was that “the city to me was never just what I heard my white liberal friends say it was. In their world, people of color were all victims. But while my teammates had been victimized, their experience and their perception of the experience of black Americans could not be reducible to victimization. To many, what the label of victimization implied was an insult to their dignity and discipline, strength and potential.”

Bradley’s acknowledgement of this “complexity” unrecognized by liberals appears to be just and generous. However, it contains a crucial ambiguity. On the one hand, Bradly could easily be drawing upon arguments made by historians like Eugene Genovese, who argued on the basis of his studies of slavery that slavery must be understood not only in terms of what it did to African Americans, but also in terms of the cultures of survival and resistance developed by African Americans under extraordinarily adverse conditions. In this case, the elision of the agency of African Americans in narratives of “victimization” would posit them merely as objects of policy makers: the interests of those who are presumed to benefit from these policies is thereby suppressed.

It is quite likely that Bradley is aware of analyses and studies of this sort; however, the purpose of the “complexity” he argues for is clearly different: it involves “refusing to make race an excuse for failing to pass judgement about self-destructive behavior.” In other words, whatever external conditions of oppression and limitations the structures of slavery and racism have imposed upon blacks, the internal defects of their mode of living are, in the end, the responsibility of the African American community itself. Bradley’s praise of the “dignity” and “discipline” of his black teammates has, then, another side to it—that is, it can be used as a yardstick against which to measure those without such admirable characteristics.

It is in this context that the categories of “community” and “meaning” function in Bradley’s text. If “dignity,” “discipline,” “strength,” and “potential” are available to African- Americans in general (as evinced by Bradley’s teammates’ possession of these qualities), then it follows that the problems of African Americans are a result of the failure of these qualities to be realized in the African American community. Thus the deplorable conditions in the inner cities can be attributed not to class and racist institutional inequalities, but to a “crisis in meaning.” “Without meaning, life has no hope; without hope there can be no struggle; without struggle there can be no personal betterment.” The complexities Bradley argues for, then, lead to a conclusion that both whites and blacks have their own specific responsibility to make changes. The problem, though, is to what extent the combination of these heterogeneous agencies and modes of activities—whites giving up their privileges, blacks behaving more responsibly—can in any way be organized in a coherent program or strategy. For example, how likely is it that discourses which blame African Americans for inner city deterioration—and policies based on these discourses—will persuade whites to give up their racism?

Meanwhile, Bradley argues that the site at which “meaning,” in the sense of a set of values determining “acceptable” and “unacceptable” behaviors, is produced, is the “community”: “without a community, there could be no commonly held standards, without some commonly held standards, there could be no community.” This circular reasoning abstracts “community” and “meaning” from larger socio-economic and political structures (like the racism which Bradley claims to be concerned about), and makes them appear completely autonomous and self-determining. That is, if we accept this reasoning, we are compelled to believe that the construction of “community” is determined entirely by the production and preservation of “meaning” as a totally ungrounded or “free” act of the members of the community itself.

Postmodern cultural studies in the academy has also argued against the “abstractions” and “generalizations” of liberal and Marxist theories, and has claimed that such “totalizing” theories neglect the ways in which localized, specific social agents construct their own meanings in response to (but not, in the end, strictly determined by) larger, ultimately global, social structures. Despite the occasional gesturing toward global entities (like capitalism) in cultural studies, the insistence on a self-contained dynamic of meaning production in local sites leads such considerations to recede into the background of analysis and political prescriptions. Social transformation, on this view, is ultimately a local affair, involving not the destruction and replacement of oppressive global structures, but simply the establishment of more “liberated” or “meaningful” forms of activity for local agents. Whether Bradley has any familiarity with this now dominant tendency in culture studies is irrelevant; what is significant is that these similar ways of making sense of problems such as racism and poverty serve similar needs, and represent the coalescence of the dominant institutions of late capitalism around what we could call a “post-liberal” agenda.

Bradley recognizes the emptiness of a purely moralizing approach to inner city problems. “In such a world [i.e., one with “no connection to religion, no family outside a gang, no sense of place outside the territory, no imagination beyond the cadence of rap or the violence of TV”], to “just say no” to drugs or to “study hard for 16 years so you can get an $18,000 a year job are laughable.” He also sees some connection between the larger american culture and the “crisis of meaning” in the inner cities. This larger culture encourages “materialism,” “sex,” and “violence,” and therefore renders ineffective the values embodied in the traditional institutions of the black community, like “black churches and mosques.” However, this connection is a purely ideal or moral one: that is, the problem, according to Bradley, is not that decent schools in which one could “study hard” do not, for the most part, exist, or that even $18,000 a year jobs are few and far between. The problem, then, is not one of transforming the “material” conditions of African Americans, but of enabling the realization of “desires rooted in the values of commitment and service to the community.”

Bradley outlines three possible strategies for urban America: “abandonment, encirclement, or conversion.” Abandonment would, as one would expect, involve an acceptance of the anachronistic character of the modern city in the face of new economic and technological developments—in this case, the problem would not be to save the cities, but to avoid wasteful investments in their reconstruction and try to ease the way to “new and different forms of social arrangements.” “Encirclement” would entail an increasing polarization along class and racial lines, and a “Balkanization” of America with its division into armed camps of “haves” and “have nots.” Meanwhile, “conversion,” the strategy Bradley proposes, “means winning over all segments of urban life to a new politics of change, empowerment and common effort. It is as different from the politics of dependency as it is from the politics of greed. Its optimism relates to the belief that every person can realize his or her potential in an atmosphere of nuturing liberty. Its morality is grounded in the conviction that each of us has an obligation to another human being simply because she is another human being.”

Bradley does not exclude the role of the government from this “conversion strategy.” He supports an eclectic mix of traditional liberal as well as many neo-conservative proposals: job programs, long term growth strategies, support for small minority businesses, Enterprise Zones, etc. However, he contrasts this approach with both liberal and neo-conservative ones through its focus on the “empowerment” and “participation” of the community involved: “Answers will not come from an elite who has decided in advance what the new society will look like. Instead, the future will be shaped by the voices from inside the turmoil of urban America, as well as by those who claim to see the larger picture.”

Here, again, we see the introduction of the “complex” combination of viewpoints from which Bradley claims to speak. It is, in other words, necessary to devise national strategies and programs (the traditional liberal approach, advanced by those “who claim to see the larger picture”), but only through a constant dialogue with the “objects” of those policies, thus presumably ensuring that the programs will genuinely be grounded in the desires which emerge out of the specific community itself. However, what Bradley fails to note is that this method of overcoming racial divisions, poverty, and elitism in fact presupposes the continued existence of prevailing power relations: those in the inner cities may be granted the right to define their own needs and desires, but the capacity to develop and implement the policies which will meet these needs and satisfy these desires still lie elsewhere. At the same time, Bradley’s proposals and the “values” he supports make it clear that those needs and desires had better be the “correct” ones: for example, they must include the “desire” for the traditional (patriarchal) family unit, and purely individualistic measures of “success.”

Bradley, then, is arguing for a way of using the various “liberal” and “conservative” discourses and proposals available by articulating the management of these proposals through local and largely conservative community institutions. Furthermore, since on Bradley’s own account, these institutions (church, mosque, family) have lost their effectivity and authority, part of the governmental project of “preserving” their specificity and autonomy will be, in fact, to introduce reconstructed versions of these institutions. This conception is what is at stake in Bradley’s notions of “participation” and “empowerment,” as well as in his establishment of his “black teammates” as a standard according to which the behavior of the community can be regulated. What is at stake, in other words, is the construction of a new middle class in minority communities which will be both capable of “guiding” (or disciplining) the unmanageable elements of the “community,” while controlling the activities of this managerial class by maintaining their dependence upon resources which will still be controlled by “elites” (like Bradley himself). The more “complex” vision Bradley argues for, then, is ultimately a way for dominant institutions to maintain control while delegating all reponsibility for solving the problems of oppressed groups to those groups themselves. In this context, a “confession” of the “sins” of White America (from which no consequences follow in Bradley’s argument, except perhaps absolution) is a rather small price to pay.

In order to understand the purpose served by such arguments, it is necessary to examine exactly what kind of “problem,” according to Bradley, the deterioration of race relations and of conditions in the inner cities represents.

“By the year 2000, only 57% of the people entering our workforce will be native-born whites. That means that the economic future of the children of white Americans will increasingly depend on the talents of non-white Americans.”

“If we allow them to fail because of our penny-pinching or timidity about straight talk, America will become a second-rate power.”

Ultimately, despite all of Bradley’s rhetoric about racial justice and individual(istic) morality, what is at stake in his argument is the “economic future of white Americans” (the middle and upper classes) and America’s global power and ability to compete in the new global marketplace. However, in this case, the need to “bolster” and regulate local black institutions is only in the interest of black Americans insofar as we accept the inevitability of the insertion of blacks into the global capitalist system. In this case, the division of labor Bradley proposes would make sense: the “elites” (liberal and conservative) will manage America’s response to global changes, and local institutions will ensure that specific “communities” will be prepared to take their predetermined “place” within the global economy.

That is, the post-liberal agenda Bradley is arguing for is less (or not at all) about racial justice (which would require introducing the categories of equality and self-determination—understood as control over the resources of the community and an end to the exploitation of inner city communities) than about regulating heterogeneous workforces and maintaining stability in a radically transformed global economic environment. A central reason for the demise of social democratic and liberal goals is that these presupposed the possibility of controlling or working with national capitalists and redistributing national income, ultimately in the interest of maintaining national conditions of exploitation. However, with the rise of global capitalist corporations indifferent to national policies and problems, but very interested in procuring the various kinds of workforces required for its production processes (high skilled, low skilled, etc.), the environment in which governments operate and the pressures to which they must respond have been drastically transformed.

In this context, the national state has increasingly assumed the function of producing, regulating and segmenting the labor forces under its supervision in accord with the various needs of global corporations: the mechanism enforcing this responsibility is the competition among governments (local, state and national) to attract the “best” kinds of capital. The heterogeneity and diversity so celebrated by contemporary postmodern and multicultural discourses is, then, less an intrinsic quality of people or “communities” themselves, than a mode of classifying these communities in accord with their relative and “specific” usefulness to global capital. The problem posed by racial division and inner city “chaos,” then, is essentially a problem of their potentially destabilizing effects and the consequent reduction of America’s attractiveness to global corporations.

In this case, what the post-liberal agenda enables (regardless of Bradley’s rather perfunctory support for jobs programs, low cost housing, education, etc.) is the establishment of “local” criteria based on the specific needs and capacities of diverse communities defined in relation to the requirements of global capital: criteria regarding education, job training, wage levels, and so on. For example, how can one continue to argue for a nationally set minimum wage (a “universal” standard) if this ignores the fact that inner city residents might not be “worth” that wage level to a corporation which could easily go elsewhere? How could one argue for raising inner city educational levels to that of the wealthier suburbs, or of bussing students to the suburbs so that they can take advantage of those facilities, if what inner city communities “really need” are jobs that correspond to the level of “responsibility” that inner city family structures now make possible and require (for example, “workfare” programs to eliminate the “dependency” of welfare mothers, while keeping the family intact)? The post-liberal agenda, then, provides policy makers with the “flexibility” needed to institutionalize and “stabilize” inequality.

At the same time, by reconstructing “community standards” (really, as I have argued, the standards of a reconstructed capitalist order), post-liberalism isolates separate communities. If the real problem is preserving the “meanings” embodied in the family and community institutions, the basis for arguing for a commonality among working people or for unity among African Americans is undermined: that is, “material” factors like a secular decline in wage levels and living standards which might form the basis of unity not only among American workers, but with Mexican and other Third World workers organized within a world which is becoming a giant “free trade zone,” are rigorously excluded from Bradley’s argument; as is the possibility of conceptualizing African Americans as a potent independent force in the democratization of American and even global institutions. It is precisely in order to exclude such possibilities, which are themselves produced by an economic order increasingly indifferent to community “autonomy,” that texts such as Bradley’s must invoke the mysticism of our common “Americanness.”

It is this articulation of “difference” with “commonality,” along with its apparent opposition to the “failed” policies of “left” and “right,” which gives the post-liberal agenda its attractive force. Post-liberalism, like the New Right, has also been active and fairly successful in making use of critiques of traditional liberalsim which were originally advanced by the radical movements of the 1960s, which is where the notions of “community autonomy” and “empowerment,” along with the critique of “bureaucratic” liberal interventions, that Bradley appropriates were first developed. It is the use and “revaluation” of these terms which provide the basis for common interests and actions by liberal elites like Bradley and local elites like some black nationalist leaders, each of which has an interest in establishing the division of labor implicit in post-liberalism.

In addition, the growing hegemony and level of self-consciousness of global capitalism makes alternatives seem distant or irrelevant: hence, the despairing claim that, after all, it is “better than nothing,” or than Reaganism. However, the attention of those interested in real “change” must be directed at the potential of a workforce that, despite the efforts of capital and its various administrative bureaus (the world’s nation-states), will be increasingly unified in terms of its material conditions of exploitation and its ability to disrupt the smooth operation of the system of exploitation. Capital’s apparently absolute ability to move from place to place at will is only illusory: recent and contemporary transfers of capital have primarily been from “outmoded” production sites which were becoming less profitable than alternatives elsewhere. However, capitals will be less willing and less able to move from new production sites chosen specifically for their favorable conditions of exploitation.

Furthermore, the very conditions which make governments vulnerable to the demands of capital can make the dangers of “instability” a lever for increasing working class power, both economically and politically. For example, the recent uprising in LA demonstrated some of the possible “de-stabilizing” effects which can follow from a section of the global workforce refusing to “cooperate.” The most urgent interests of global capital at this moment are in “local” stability and in its own global freedom of movement. The first line of defense for working people, then, is to deny it both this stability, and the freedom from responsibility for the consequences of its mobility.

This means that radicals must resist attempts to interpellate them into a new mode of crisis management which makes promises to “improve” conditions, or to be the “only alternative.” Participation in such attempts is incompatible with radical transformation, insofar as it accepts the logic of homogenizing “local” communities as a means of articulating them into the global system. Our focus must be not on “stabilizing” local communities but on supporting other articulations: that is, we must attempt to support connections and alliances across communities and across borders between those interested in developing the means of “non-cooperation” in systematic and organized ways. This does not mean adopting the “universal” standpoint of the liberal bureaucrat, who sees only “victims” and objects of policies, but rather the standpoint of the “revolutionary tribune of the people” who supports the agency of the oppressed in all of those practices directed against oppressive institutions and structures. The “difference” between the practices of the oppressed and the knowledges and politics of “intellectuals” and “leaders” which is exploited by the new “complexity” of the post-liberal standpoint must therefore not be dissolved into quasi-democratic notions of “dialogue” or “local autonomy.” Rather, this difference must be transformed, on the one hand, into pedagogical relations, in which “intellectuals” and “leaders” learn from the struggles and strategies of the oppressed and also produce more “abstract,” “analytical,” and “critical” knowledges which can aid the oppressed in making their struggles more effective; and, on the other hand, into the articulation of struggles carried on at different sites, both in the “local” communities themselves and in the institutions of knowledge production and the production of labor power in which most prospective “intellectuals” and leaders are located. In all of these institutions, that is, the work of “destabilizing” the production of knowledge and subjectivities useful for the new global capitalist order along with the production of knowledges and practices which can aid in the production of collective modes of opposition must take place.