1. Getting a Fix
on Fragmentation
"Breakdown" as Estimation Error, Rhetorical Strategy,
and Organizational Accomplishment
Jonathan Rieder
It is not easy to get a fix on "fragmentation." There is something too primal about social conflict and the passions it stirs to encourage calm appraisal. It is common to say that change can be "dizzying"; naturally enough, people become unnerved by the ominously open character of uncertainty. By upsetting familiar expectations, as Durkheim famously argued, even moments of good fortune may plunge its beneficiaries into the abyss of anomie. And cognitive psychologists have observed how the fallibility of human beings, who aspire to rationality but often fall short of attaining it, leaves them vulnerable to distorted judgment as they try to make sense of the world. Meanwhile, a key existential dilemma can deform our response to change: even as human beings yearn for a changeless state of tension-free satiation, we also have a more curious, restless disposition that nudges us forward to engage the world. This tension between embeddedness and emergence can provoke volatile, ambivalent reactions in times of social upheaval.[1]
The vertigo of change, the difficulty of construing the fractious events that provoke the label fragmentation, the ever-present danger of error and illusion—this chapter takes up these elemental themes and pursues them in their intricate variations. And although there are countless ways to succumb to misreading, three kinds of interpretive mistakes in particular provide the focus of this analysis. Once we take such mistakes into account, it becomes clear that the verdict of fragmentation is the outcome not just of major fractures in the foundation of social
The first set of errors, the subject of section 1, involves dynamics both of mind and the senses. Transfixed by the flamboyant, if ofttimes rare, case, people—imperfect in their cognitive abilities, overwhelmed by a glut of equally imperfect information, yet resolved to fashion the semblance of a process of reasoning—often move from the skimpiest of evidence to grand verdicts. Such inferential leaping is only one of the ways the distractions of attention yield bad conclusions. Sometimes the convulsions of the moment simply envelop the observer in the haze of the present. In the process the ground of the past—and the comparative vantage it permits—vanishes from view.
The second category of errors, the subject of section 2, originates at some remove from sensuous experience and involves the dangerous trap of language. To some extent the way we construe the signs of fragmentation reflects our received rhetorics, which channel our judgments in ways that suspiciously sustain our ideological passions. In our time conservatives have resorted to the narrative of fragmentation more than have so-called progressives. At least the right has favored specific versions of the narrative, especially the theme of cultural war, whose effect, if not intent, tends to displace accounts that place economic injustice, social inequality, and racist exclusion at the core of social discussion.
The final set of interpretive errors, the subject of sections 3, 4, and 5, derives from the absence of what might be called an "institutionalist heuristic, " a set of ad-hoc decision rules that guide human attention to the pragmatic institutional and organizational forces that often account, if not for the fact of conflicts of interest and identity, then at least for the precise form they achieve at a particular historical moment. Institutional dynamics shape both the choreography of conflict and the production of false impression and wrongheaded theorizing.
It may seem rarified to begin a volume on the frenzies of fragmentation with the abstracted concerns of interpretive methodology, but I hope to temper that sense of abstraction in two ways. First, as the essay progresses, without departing from the methodological emphasis I will gradually shift to the substantive question of what cumulative impression of divisions in the United States can be discerned in the various essays in this volume. The second point is more cosmic and moral. Surely there is a long literature in comparative history, sociology, and political science that warns of the danger of divisive conflicts to democratic life. Yet it is axiomatic that we can't buttress democracy by flailing at phantoms; we
SEDUCTION OF THE SENSES
The metaphor of fragmentation evokes the fragility of democratic pluralism. Seymour Martin Lipset captured the demonic power of xenophobic movements of the middle classes in his concept of "center extremism, " in which a frustrated petite bourgeoisie turns to movements of populism, Caesarism, and fascism.[2] Mindful of such unnerving precedents, Kevin Phillips began to worry at an early point in the Reagan Revolution about the populist conservatism he himself had heralded only a few years earlier. Invoking the aphorism of alarm—"kindred causes, congruent psychologies … suggest a potential for turmoil"[3]—Phillips discerned four striking parallels with Weimar Germany: inflation, the collapse of faith in political institutions, the nihilism of a libertine and decadent culture of excess, and nationalist frustration in the aftermath of military humiliation.
Although one can spot in recent conflicts glimmers of such parallels, one has to be careful not to casually invoke them (as indeed Phillips did). Whether choosing metaphors or historic parallels, the trick involves making the apt comparison, and dangers emerge all along the way. The key challenges to clear-eyed understanding lie with a host of methodological difficulties that involve the ways we go about knowing, the ways we make inferences, the ways in which our attention is drawn to objects of fascination.
Perhaps the most daunting of these obstacles unfolds at the elemental level of the senses, and it involves the intrusive power of visual experience. What is more vivid than the pulverized body of James Byrd, after he was roped like a rodeo calf by white racist goons and dragged from the back of a pickup truck; the crucified body of Matthew Sheppard, strung up on a barbed-wire fence as testimony to homophobic mania; the almost balletic dance of the black thugs over the felled body of the white truck driver whose head they smashed with a concrete block in the midst of the Los Angeles riots; or the bodies of the kids strewn about the lunchroom in Columbine, Colorado.
Such evidence makes it easy to glide from the small moment to vast pronouncements in liquid elisions. Yet it's not always clear whether such fragments yield evidence or incantation. And if the former, what sort of evidence? The problem here is one of metonymic reduction combined
Such faulty estimates have been especially vivid in the realm of race, in which the media fit complex events into their own narrative form of racial spectacle. The Crown Heights riots, for example, were undeniably one of the most violent moments of "black-Jewish" conflict in U.S. history. They also served for many as a symbol of the murderous tribal passions that always threaten to tear apart the urban order. But that was not all Crown Heights was. Gavin Cato, the little Guyanese boy run over and killed by a car in the procession of the Lubavitcher rabbi, played with Jewish boys on his block. In the riot aftermath there were black residents who went out of their way, through compensatory smiles and waves, to affirm sympathy for their Jewish neighbors and distance themselves from the rioters. A Haitian-American taxi driver told me poignantly of the Jewish wariness his approach provoked. "As I get close, I can tell, the Jews are thinking, ‘What's he going to do to me? Is he one of the guys who broke my windows?’" And in other respects Crown Heights could be seen as a polyglot neighborhood in which most of the time klezmer and calypso, rasta dreadlocks and Yiddish payess, West Indian carnival and Purim parade manage to coexist in an uneasy truce.[4] Clearly, observers have a good deal of discretion in how to code such interactions.
Beyond the oddities of Crown Heights, much of the 1990s public discussion of "black-Jewish conflict" and the meaning of black support for Louis Farrakhan suffered from a similar fixation on vivid events. Farrakhan's reference to "synagogues of Satan" conjured up the anti-Judaic elements of the New Testament, and in the mid-1990s, Khallid Muhammad, who never stopped taunting "Jew York City, " upped the ante of anti-Jewish vitriol in his Kean College speech, in which he targeted "hook-nosed, bagel-eating, lox-eating Jews" for controlling the slave trade and "sucking our blood in the black community." In response to such incidents Henry Louis Gates Jr. offered a version of the following argument on the New York Times op-ed page: "While anti-Semitism is generally on the wane in this country it has been on the rise among black Americans." And its very character, worried Gates, had transmuted into "‘topdown’ anti-Semitism, [which is] in large part the province of the bettereducated classes."[5]
But even while black anti-Semitism took new organizational forms and disputes over Farrakhan, the Million Man March, and the burning of a
We are dealing in part with the dilemma psychologists refer to as the "availability heuristic, " which refers to the propensity of human attention to alight on rare but highly flamboyant instances in the quest to demystify a murky reality. Dependence on such obvious signs of hatred, intolerance, and breakdown as clues is not irrational; it follows the same economizing logic of "statistical discrimination." In a less than perfect world suffused with ambiguity, it's a way of getting information on the cheap. But with information, no less than any other purchase, you often get what you pay for, which means the information may be no more perfect than the world it seeks to know. So the relation between vivid sign and general tendency, between organized conflict and the sentiments of the broader society, between a cramped and bounded rationality and the distorted verdict that issues forth from it is hardly self-evident or mechanically linear.
Indeed, organized manifestations of violence may actually follow from "liberalization"; in some white ethnic neighborhoods, only after a loosening of racial attitudes has enabled blacks to gain entry to the housing market does sufficient integration reach a threshold to call forth the virulent rejectionists. In short, the expressions of "fragmentation" do not track precisely with some underlying set of attitudes, feelings, and opinions. As a result the tendency to read such volatile episodes as reflections of something deeper and more pervasive is risky business.
Less dramatic aspects of visibility than the power of rare and spectacular events to guide perception also encourage misreadings of fragmentation. Consider the markers of difference that figure so prominently in post-1965 migration debates. Those who believe the new immigrants refuse to abandon their home culture and embrace that of the host often cite visual, linguistic, and auditory evidence—the funny perfumes of New York taxicabs, voting instructions in Spanish, the odd inflections of convenience-store cashiers, the huddles of dark men milling about the modern
As countless studies have established, the new Americans are not destabilizing the land with their separatist identities. On the contrary, the children of these latest travelers look more and more like previous older generations of newcomers to America. But how, then, to explain this gap between actuality and perception without resorting to tired versions of a frustrated lower-middle class repulsed by "otherness." Mary C. Waters chap. 6) offers a more nuanced explanation of the misperception of this aspect of fragmentation: the new immigrants differ from the old ones less in their quotient of virtue than in the circumstances of their incorporation into America. (Those virtuous and "melted" immigrants of yore—the Irish and Italians, Jews and Poles—were not so happily embraced as virtuous and melted at the time.) After neonativist restrictions on immigration in the 1920s cut off the infusion of new ethnic colleagues, greenhorns no longer dominated the immigrant population. By contrast, for many of today's immigrants, such as the Mexicans, a constant influx of newcomers continually replenishes the ranks of the visibly strange, generating public markers of difference and thereby obscuring the underlying glacial movement toward linguistic, political, and cultural acculturation. This continuous flow has a powerful impact on immigrants' presentation of collective self to external audiences. As Waters observes, "Simply put, the visible aspects of the ethnic group—speaking a language other than English, occupational specialization, residential concentration—will not be diluted, and it will strike the average American that the new immigrants are not assimilating."
A similar instance of this choreography of illusion can be seen at times in that most-bandied-about example of ethnic separatism, "the black table." The specter of black students huddling together generates the impression of tribal huddling, and indeed it often reflects precisely such a sentiment. But as Inge-Lise Ameer has shown in one of the few empirical studies of such tables, the impression may hide the reality that many black, Latino, and Asian students have diverse and branching networks. Like code switchers fluent in multiple codes, they shift between ethnic and mixed tables in complex permutations; the constancy of the impression of black huddling is belied by the underlying rotation of members at any particular moment.[8]
The flip side of this affliction of the senses is an affliction of time: the danger of immersion in immediate experience. To return to our starting point: fragmented, to be sure, full of tribal animosities, but compared to
These were portentous signs, full of ominous promise. This may be merely another way of stating the obvious: when hasn't the United States been full of divisive tensions of one sort or another? Even if the United States has enjoyed relative unity, as consensus historians used to argue, consensus on certain points only intensified the likelihood of bickering on others. Despite the entire legacy of "exceptionalism, " struggles of class and religion and ethnicity have always tugged and pulled.
Part of the comparative problem involves this matter of a baseline. Take the people who complain about the Afrocentric passions of blacks or the new immigrants who refuse to adopt the language of the host land. They forget that for decades German-American, Irish-American, and Italian-American politics were afflicted with "the politics of revenge, " as Samuel Lubell dubbed them—an isolationism that was payback for their ethnic humiliation in wars against their homelands. Catholics were long lambasted as practitioners of popish identity politics, and they built their own equivalent of Afrocentric academies—they called them Catholic schools. The Irish, like those of "Hebraic persuasion, " were seen for a time as members of alien, unassimilable races. Today nobody thinks the Irish threaten American civic culture, and the Jews have long since "become" whites.
The moments of communal abrasion have varied in their intensity, which adds a certain institutional context to the cycle of volatility. It may be, as Albert Hirschman argued, that there is a certain endogenous logic to the rhythm of engaged mobilization and quiescent withdrawal into private consumption. But if we look comparatively, advanced societies vary a good deal in their susceptibility to such emotive swings, and the United States has followed the rhythmic alternation of idealistic effusion and crude materialism, of public engagement and private enrichment.
Students of party realignment have been especially keen on thirty-two-
The truth of the matter is that the United States, like other complex societies, is hardly one, unambivalent thing. Even individualism, our much-trumpeted signature, implodes into rival strains: a Jeffersonian tendency of self-expression and rights, a utilitarian one of economic striving and self-making. Garry Wills, taking a knock at Louis Hartz's emphasis on the single-minded fixity of the liberal tradition, once complained that "Hartz did not see the connection of the Horatio Alger ethic with religious fundamentalism, with Methodist morals and Baptist fervor and Puritan rhetoric. Hartz views his Locke in a cool secular light which does not reach to the dark things, the self-punishment, behind Americans' abject devotion to success."[10] All of this warns against seeing universal law at work when only a historically particular element in a broader cultural repertoire has been given decisive, visible expression.
THE TRAP OF LANGUAGE: FRAGMENTATION AS RHETORIC
It could be argued that Americans are less divided than they used to be, at least in certain respects. "The pattern of social cleavages, " cautions Paul Starr, "may be neither as new nor as threatening" as recent worries suggest chap. 12). Paul DiMaggio makes a similar point in underscoring the sloppy way people talk about polarization, which can mean at least two different things: "a shift in opinions of the whole population from moderate centrist views toward more extreme positions, leaving a yawning gap in the middle of the ideological spectrum, " or "disagreement between specific kinds of people thought to be at odds with one another, such as men and women, blacks and whites, or Republicans and Democrats." "On virtually every other issue [save abortion], " DiMaggio concludes, "polarization either remained constant or actually declined. The public actually has become more unified in its attitudes toward race, gender, and crime since the 1970s" chap. 4).
Alan Wolfe's powerful eight-community study of "what middle-class Americans really think about God, country, family, racism, welfare, immigration, homosexuality" adds force to the essentially centrist portrait of Americans. Wolfe ranged widely, from liberal, Jewish Brookline, Massachusetts, to heavily black Dekalb County, Georgia; from prosperous Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, home to one of the nation's largest charismatic Pentecostal megachurches, to the working-class suburb of Eastlake, California, with its large numbers of Asian and Mexican first-time homeowners; from the gated retirement community of Rancho Bernardo, California, to many other places, too. And wherever he went, Wolfe found not a yawning chasm of moral disagreement and inflamed cultural resentment but people who "long for a sensible center and distrust ideological thinking." All in all, Americans are "reluctant to pass judgment, they are tolerant to a fault."[11]
If this diagnosis is right, why is there such an eager audience for dire predictions? Part of the problem is that we rarely approach such heated moments with the benefit of Olympian distance. It may be there is something in the human psyche that is perversely drawn to dramatic idioms of crisis and breakdown, the same logic that attracts us to horror films and other popular genres of horrific fantasy. In both these cases, as the line between drama and melodrama collapses, there is a danger that the trope of crisis may become a tropism, a virtually autonomic response that reflects our sense of vertigo.
Social scientists have hardly been immune to such imagery. Their love affair with the rhetoric of crisis, rooted in a fearful fascination with modernity, has a long history. Not so long ago the left was busy embracing all manner of "fiscal crises of the state, " "legitimation crises" and other versions as well, as if to compensate for the primal God that failed and the main big-bang economic crisis—and the convulsive class conflict it would trigger—that never materialized. More often conservative proponents of order of various stripes, from Burkeans to homeostatic functionalists, have been drawn to the beauty of equilibrium, and they have fretted more often about crises of values and morale.
Here is not the place to rehearse the complex careers of these idioms of breakdown, but it is worth noting that they often confuse or conflate breakdown and conflict, demonizing the first and delegitimating the second. They also tend to overestimate the importance of moral solidarity in holding societies together, as if there were not other forces that produce common ground besides shared norms and beliefs. And they support a basically ahistorical perspective that dispenses with the tricky work
It wouldn't be worth slamming home this last point so relentlessly if the matter was merely academic. But neither our love of the apocalypse nor the idioms we choose to express it are purely innocent of politics. Another obstacle to knowing involves this organized character of our public debate, the fact that, to use William Gamson's apt phrasing, our idioms are sponsored—carried forth, advocated, and mocked by specific political interests and institutions. It thus makes sense that in the contest of rhetoric, some are more drawn to the rhetoric of breakdown—and to specific versions of the idiom of breakdown—than others.
In the decades after the New Deal enshrined itself and realigned the nation's electoral channels, the right has had a vested interest in blurring economic tension with crosscutting issues of foreign policy, internal subversion, and the like.[12] As the instability of the post-1968 coalition, based on a "marriage of the classes, " became evident, conservatives and Republicans plied the "social issues" as a way of shifting the axis of debate and abrasion. More recently, Theda Skocpol observes, conservatives have targeted liberalism as "the enemy of community and an agent of fragmentation, turning young against old, class against class, and black against white" chap. 11).
Idioms, like individuals, have biographies, and the right didn't come to its particular version of the fragmentation narrative overnight. The aristocratic right of the 1950s recoiled from what it diagnosed as "civilizational malaise." This was pretty rarified, the anxious musings of esoteric elites—southern agrarians, Straussians, Christian triumphalists, neo-Burkeans, even sentimental monarchists. But soon the broader environment began to expand the market for restorationist appeals beyond cerebral reactionaries.[13]
Starting in the 1960s, the right-wing diagnosis of breakdown began to diffuse and take a more popular—and pseudopopulist—form. Increasingly, the average person on the street who couldn't have cared less about "civilizational malaise" was becoming disquieted by social breakdown. After Miranda warnings, other controversial Supreme Court decisions, and a burgeoning crime rate began to deepen popular fears of lawlessness, right-wing cries against the "usurpations" of judicial activism—rather obscure stuff by any reckoning—began to resonate at a more popular level. In a pattern repeatedly evident the state, in the form of the judiciary, played a crucial role in politicizing, and thus mobilizing, rightwing populist conservatism.
This crossing over of the idiom of breakdown coincided with, and was energized by, the white backlash that helped foment the rhetoric of crisis. At the same time, the youth rebellion, sexual high jinks, and crisis of authority that originally seemed an affliction of the well heeled began to diffuse and flourish in the more plebeian reaches of the nation. This was the broader environment in which Nixon, Agnew, and Wallace refined their respective versions of the fragmentation narrative. As James Sundquist observed in the 1970s, "In the public's perception, all these things merged. Ghetto riots, campus riots, street crime, anti-Vietnam marches, poor people's marches, drugs, pornography, welfarism, rising taxes, all had a common thread: the breakdown of family and social discipline, of order, of concepts of duty, of respect for law, of public and private morality."[14] Long before the phrase "culture wars" gained popular parlance, the attack on the McGovernite wing of the Democratic Party as the party of "Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion" crystallized the theme of moral disarray. The fragmentation narrative, then, is a weapon in the rhetorical assault that is inseparable from a larger political struggle.
Of course what constitutes "breakdown" or "disequilibrium" is not always clear, as Martin Luther King Jr.'s rejoinder to the arguments for order suggests. King's answer was based on a set of reversals: suffering could be redemptive; conflict was the creative condition of a more just harmony. In this inversion the presence of fragmentation was transformed, lifted from the realm of the "dysfunctional" into a healthy signal of painful inequality and oppression. And the containment of conflict, the surface appearance of harmony at the expense of justice, was transfigured into the dysfunctional—to individuals, sectors, and classes who suffered from oppressive life conditions.
The same definitional scuffling erupted around the riots of the 1960s, which looked quite different to liberal and conservative analysts: one person's breakdown is another one's insurgency. None of this was purely a matter of "social construction, " one narrative being equivalent to the other in some relativist standoff. There were good data to suggest the rioters were not unhinged members of an anomic underclass, flailing about in frustrated rage. On the contrary, in general rioters bore many of the signs of political rationality. They were politically knowledgeable and boasted a strong belief that they could control their fate. More critically, they embraced a vernacular theory of justice that found the system normatively wanting, which led to their withdrawal of moral legitimacy from the state.[15]
As the right's increasingly antielitist rhetoric indicates, the narrative battle between left and right settled in heated debates over the character of the vaunted "middle classes." Since de Tocqueville, and even before, defining the American has been a national pastime. For decades both the right and left have energized that timeless effort, and it is only natural that in this quintessentially bourgeois nation, they have often focused on the middle class—as an object of disappointment, celebration, or mockery. In the right's "populist" telling the moral common sense of the virtuous middle has been under attack by a decadent media and libertine mandarins who, with their loose morals and fancy notions of therapy, excuse badness and disdain square values. Such judgments have been offered up by Doctor Laura and Pat Robertson and by William Bennett and Gary Bauer. This analysis locates fragmentation in the moral failures of dangerous voluptuaries and the anomic anarchy that followed from their disregard for moral regulation and the needs of the collective conscience.
Bill Clinton proved an irresistible projective screen for such a demonology. From his wanton love of cheeseburgers to his sexual gluttony to his fickle regard for truth, he seemed to embody the moral failures encoded in the cry of "acid, abortion, and amnesty": feral immersion in the compulsions of pleasure, an inability to discipline himself and his appetites. Who besides Clinton could achieve this interpretive triumph: taking some 1950s cartoon of Freudian exegesis that understood cigars as phallic symbols and desublimating them into a sex toy? Here was a man clearly guilty of the fallacy—one is tempted to say the phallacy—of misplaced concreteness. And who can forget the famous fellatio of misplaced concreteness too?
If the fragmentation narrative has been more attractive to the right than to the left, some portions of the left, at least of liberalism, have proffered their own version of the idiom of fragmentation. Paradoxically, since the social democratic impulse of New Deal liberalism gave way to something different—what the right used to attack as "limousine liberalism"—the liberal left has been in sway to a less majoritarian vision: alienated from the middle, it has often conjured up a land full of racist beasts, religious maniacs, and mean misogynists.
This redepiction of the middle, whatever its partial basis in empirical reality, was accompanied by a shift in the institutional domain in which liberalism achieved many of its victories. As Michael Walzer once pointed out, throughout the 1950s and 1960s a disproportionate share
Part of Clinton's genius was to rescue the middle from its ignominy. Jimmy Carter's biracial populism, especially notable through the South outside the classic Black Belt electoral districts, which in 1948 bolted from the Democrats, had already pointed the way beyond George Wallace's courting of "forgotten Americans, " a phrase that resounded with echoes of Franklin Roosevelt. Clinton's faith in the progressive possibilities of the center jibed perfectly with his adviser Stanley Greenberg's larger academic diagnosis: "In the wake of the civil rights struggle, it was difficult to contemplate policies that would encompass the aspirations of both impoverished blacks and working-class whites."[16] The remedy was to find policies that would move the middle from populist conservatism back to some variant of populist progressivism. Writing from a different perspective, William Schneider concluded, "It will not be easy to get Democrats to think in universal terms. Most voters have no problem with the Democratic Party's speaking out for the interests of women, blacks, and working people; that is its traditional role as advocate for the disadvantaged and victims of discrimination. But speaking out for the interests of feminists, labor unions, and civil rights organizations is something else. That is not populism. That is interest-group liberalism."[17]
Fragmentation here was thus located not in liberal indiscipline or merely in the mean-spirited and racist dispositions of vulnerable whites but in the failure to implement policies that might transcend racial, economic, and generational differences. As Theda Skocpol points out in this volume, fragmentation is not just a matter of "irreconcilable conflicts of identity and interest." It is, at least in part, a contingent product of broader historical choices and institutional strategies that vary in their potential to promote alliance or altercation. "Politics and the state are not helpless witnesses to those divisions. Government efforts—especially social policies—can either exacerbate conflict or diminish it" chap. 11). Over the long haul, progressive social policies, far from fragmenting the nation, have achieved precisely the opposite. Part of the problem with the contemporary political situation is that liberals, not always mindful of their own triumphant history, began to disavow universalistic policies that might bind the races and classes together.
THE FRACTIOUS (BUT NOT FRACTIONATED) CULTURE: CHANGING ATTITUDES VS. ORGANIZING IDENTITIES
Clearly, the narratives circulating among activists, members of the political class, the intelligentsia, and the punditry do not precisely reproduce the distribution of opinion in the communities for which they presume to speak. Underscoring the potential for considerable divisions between elites and rank and file within the same cultural communities, James Hunter, a key scholar of culture war battles, writes, "Public culture is largely constituted by the activities and pronouncements of elites."[18] The verdicts emanating from such special agents of cultural production often reflect the skewed vantage point from which they look out at the world, the distinctiveness of their worldviews, and the unique lore that courses through their coiled networks.
In emphasizing the idiosyncrasies of activists we confront not just the danger of reading quirky signs as reflections of the whole or the accident of happening upon randomly produced images. The likelihood of perceptual mistakes is also a product of socially organized processes involving activists on both the supply and demand sides, the subject and object sides, of the availability heuristic. The first set of factors generates susceptibility to misimpressions or partial impressions generated by organized groups. As the previous example of Jewish scrutiny of anti-Semitic speakers suggests, individuals are not randomly positioned or attentive vis-à-vis such florid signs; Jewish organizations have created a vast apparatus, including specialized departments of reporting and research, to monitor the larger environment for anti-Semitic and populist authoritarian dangers. The second set of factors generates the production of episodes that serve as the evidentiary basis for perceptual errors. The most common form of this institutionally generated gap between appearance and reality involves confusing opinion that is highly organized—and thus vividly available for all to see—for opinion that is popular and pervasive. Our concern in the three final sections of this essay is with the institutional and organizational dynamics that irretrievably shape the expression and perception of fragmentation in each of the realms of culture clash, ethnic and racial difference, and politics.[19]
An exploration of select features of Christian right mobilization underscores the power of an institutionalist account to illuminate integrative dynamics that are obscured by the surface production of "fragmenting" evidence. The visibility of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, the telegenesis of televangelists, and the general upsurge of
Those who nursed such fears were not entirely wrong. In the early 1980s, stray local Moral Majority leaders, imagining AIDS as the ultimate in God's vengeance, actually called not for extending the embrace of agape to gays but for their death. In a 1980 Moral Majority letter that warned, "We're losing the War against Homosexuality!" the Reverend Jerry Falwell, noting that gays had just gained permission to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier "to honor any sexual deviants who served in the military, " virtually shuddered, "That's right … The Tomb of the Unknown Sodomite!"[22]
This popular imagery of crazed Christians fit neatly with a dominant academic view of traditionalists and a radical cultural schism between tradition and modernity. It echoed Richard Hofstadter's depiction of a "paranoid tendency in American politics, " to which religious fundamentalists were said to be especially susceptible. Symbolized by the title of Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab's Politics of Unreason, the imagery of psychic "strain" was used by many academics to explain the aggrievement of right-wing fundamentalism as a frenzied flight by displaced groups into a clarifying past. "People or groups who are the objects of change, " argued Lipset and Raab, "seek a general ‘fundamentalism’ in order, as Paul Tillich put it, ‘to have a principle which transcends their whole disintegrated existence in individual and social life.’"[23]
As an elemental matter of shrewdly sizing up traditionalists, this diagnosis had problems. It did not really seem as if Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Ralph Reed suffered from "disintegrated existence." All three appeared to operate in the modern world quite effectively. There was the related problem of the rhetoric of unreason: in replacing the moralistic idiom of sin and salvation with the therapeutic one of health and sickness, the cosmopolitan classes seemed to be in sway
The clinical verdict of mania also could not square the kinetic sensationalism of some religious rightists with the empirical nuances of contemporary born-again Christians, whose moral and political diversity was striking. There were progressive evangelicals, middle-of-the-road ones, and many other kinds, too; the right-wing portion of Christians who mobilized thus did not represent Christians as a whole and may have numbered barely 20 percent.[25] Where evangelicals as a whole differed from other Americans—all things being equal—was on a small number of issues dear to them—homosexuality, prayer in school, and tax-exempt status for Christian academies.[26] Even so-called profamily evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants rarely made political decisions simply on the basis of such issues as gay rights and abortion. In the early 1990s, pointing to the urgency of everyday concerns with taxes, health care, and economic security among evangelical voters, one Christian right activist conceded what the survey data had shown for some time: "Even more startling, only 22 percent of self-identified born-again evangelicals … listed abortion as an important issue."[27]
Against the reality of complexity, liberal denigration begins to look a bit, to borrow that loaded word, know-nothing. And to continue this flipping, the "culture war" appears not just as a revolt of the hidebound periphery against a cosmopolitan center but also as the provincial animus of the cosmopolitan classes against their traditional enemies. One can discern a suspiciously functionalist twist in this story: decrying the fanaticism of self-righteous Christians served to reflect back to cosmopolitans their own civility. Or, taken more innocently than the liberals' need for distinction, such decrials could reflect the fact of cosmopolitans' circumscribed social networks, and all that followed from that closure: distance from other cultural sectors of American life, provincial assumptions about those "others, " lack of experience in the social regions of K-Mart and NASCAR racing, Home Depot and the Grand Ole Opry.
More was in play than the liberal confusion of the part with the whole; the liberal theory did not precisely apply to even that part comprising politically conservative fundamentalists, let alone the hidebound segment of evangelicals. Among citizens who favored the religious right, roughly three-quarters expressed comfort with the idea of blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Catholics, and Asians as neighbors. In Tom Smith's rendering, "If
Nor did the most hidebound segments of traditionalist Christians seem entirely backward-looking in recent decades. As early as 1942 the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals marked what James Hunter has deemed "a more conciliatory" response to modernity.[29] The recent political visibility of pious Christians followed their structural integration in the post–World War II period, as millions of conservative Christians, no longer shielded from the ravaging intrusions of secularism, were pulled into the orbit of new forms of social relations—the market, national organizations of entertainment and communication, the life of the metropolis. Meanwhile, their economic and educational status was rising apace. Hardly a disoriented protest of declining sectors, born-again Christianity was very much the ideology of rising economic and social sectors across the Sun Belt.
More thematically, the "past" that moral restoration sought to reinstate was a dynamically moving line of "modernized" traditionalism that had absorbed much of the culture around it. Restorationists who once declaimed against fornication now sought to hold the line at gay marriage while reading Christian sexual manuals that advised on the importance of female orgasm. Meanwhile, the fusion of religious and therapeutic ideals in Christian counseling, the emergence of the hybrid genre of Christian rock, and the blending of marketing, entertainment, and spirituality in so-called megachurches embodied the permeability of the boundaries between separatist subculture and secular society. And most notably in the decline among traditionalist Christians of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and racism one could see a continuing movement of right-wing Christianity beyond ethnocentric provincialism.
What was shifting was less the vast attitudes of the overwhelming tens of millions of ordinary Christians than the political self-conception of a segment of right-wing evangelicals and fundamentalists who were no longer content to dwell in quiescent contemplation of the anticipated Kingdom. Members of the religious right were distinguished from other citizens primarily by their ideology of Christian nationalism, "the idea that America's political troubles can be alleviated by bringing Christianity into the government."[30] In Paul DiMaggio's judicious parsing chap. 4) this was not fragmentation in the form of a widening moral chasm between
That specialized cadre of right-wing Christians was beginning to glimpse new connections between religion and politics, a shift in selfconception that facilitated and was facilitated by their increasing links to one another in organizations that leveraged their power. The process of linking dated back to at least the Carter years, which represented a powerful moment of coming out for evangelicals. The evangelicals' sense of betrayal over Carter's tightening of the rules governing Christian academies' tax-exempt status further politicized evangelical citizens. Meanwhile, conservative Republican strategists had identified evangelical and fundamentalist Christians as ripe for mobilizing and had begun to target their communal identity as a way to accomplish just that.[31] And interlocking groups such as the Kingston Group began to link secular portions of the right—the gun lobby, the antitax troops—with the more religious groups, which created new efficiencies for Republican efforts to coordinate the various elements and integrate them into the electoral and legislative process. All the while, organizers disseminating booklets like the one the Moral Majority entitled "A Program for Political Participation of Church-Going Christians" underlined both the collective political identity of "those individuals who believe in the Bible and attend church regularly" and the organizational resources the Christian right could draw on ("The Christian community has the advantage of physically gathering together on a regular basis").
In his autobiography, Strength for the Journey, the Reverend Jerry Falwell recalls his opposition to Martin Luther King Jr.'s activism and to the civil rights movement more generally. Following the participation of hundreds of clergy in the Selma, Alabama, protest, Falwell reminded his flock in his "Ministers and Marches" sermon, "The Christian's citizenship is in heaven.… Preachers are not called to be politicians but to be soul winners."[32] By the 1980s Falwell had adopted a more this-worldly translation of his faith and a new vision of Christian citizenship. In the process he closed some of the distance between King and himself.
The early 1990s writings of Ralph Reed, that quintessential new-style promoter of Christian values and the onetime director of the Christian Coalition, epitomize this growing rhetoric of identity, rights, and pluralism among Christian conservatives. Reed became the traditional Christian's point man. He perfected an evangelical version of "modern [Jewish] Orthodoxy." His boyish looks, salesman's instincts, and modern-looking
Conceding the "dark stain" of racism that is still upon evangelicals—"George Wallace may have stood in the schoolhouse door, but evangelical clergy provided the moral framework for his actions"—Reed calls for "repenting of the racist past, making amends by building a biracial future." Meanwhile, the tables have turned. Christians, Reed argues, are no longer the purveyors of intolerance. "Today the victims are [pious] Roman Catholics, Jews, fundamentalists, and evangelicals." Faced with an imperious secularism that dominates established cultural institutions, traditionalist Protestants, Jews, and Catholics too can find no reflection of themselves in popular imagery. On the contrary, they are mocked and humiliated, dismissed as fanatical practitioners of holy war. As a result the "patchwork quilt of American democracy is less beautiful, less attractive, and less colorful because one of its boldest and brightest fabrics—its religious faith—has been torn away from public display." In countless ways Reed was witnessing to a pluralism if only it would include his people in the aura of hallowed difference.[33]
FRACTIOUS (BUT NOT FRACTIONATED) PLURALISM: PERFORMING ETHNIC AND RACIAL IDENTITIES
Liberal fears of fragmentation have tended to focus on the divisive tendencies of an ethnocentric cultural right or a racist Middle America. By contrast, conservative fears of fragmentation have focused on threats of ethnic and racial particularism to American values and social solidarity. At the core of these arguments has been the complaint that Afrocentric blacks and recent immigrants are Balkanizing the nation by their defiant refusal to assimilate. Also targeted have been the academic high theorists who, from their perch in ethnic and gay studies departments, give formal warrant to less scholastic forms of tribalism. By no means confined to the right, such appraisals have spanned visceral and cerebral, democratic and racist, incarnations. In his famous jeremiad Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the avatar of classical New Deal liberalism, complained about the disuniting of America. And democratic leftists have sometimes joined them in their nervousness over identity politics, as when Todd Gitlin laments "the twilight of common dreams" in his book of that title.
Although not baseless, much of the overwrought debate on identity
Susceptibility to false impressions caused by the availability heuristic has been intensified by the power of mobilized cadres to produce florid instances of ethnic conflict—the fiery apocalypticism, say, of Nation of Islam ministers Louis Farrakhan and Khallid Muhammad—which block out less visible main tendencies—the movement of far greater numbers of former members of the Nation of Islam toward universalistic classical Islam under Wallace Dean Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad's son.[34]In the early 1990s, in front of a Korean-owned produce store, a small network of black nationalist activists hurling racist taunts, most of them African Americans in a heavily Haitian-American Brooklyn neighborhood, reinforced the media frame of black-Korean conflict, even though divisions between Afro-Caribbean and African-American leadership were intense.[35] Back in the 1960s, as white Americans recoiled from media images of activists like H. Rap Brown proclaiming, "Burn, Baby, Burn, " the majority of black Americans experienced Black Power as pride in one's race and moral impatience over unfair treatment more than as hatred of whites.[36]
In this section I concentrate on the misreading encouraged by narratives of fracture that lift moments of failed assimilation and separatist anger out of their larger institutional field. That failure to deploy an institutional perspective has two major consequences: it downplays the tensions between particularism and universalism that have recurred through American history, and it downplays the resilience of the American ability to reconfigure its cultural boundaries and the vibrant pluralism—sexual, ethnic, religious, and racial—that has emerged from it.
To highlight this context, I will return briefly to the parallels between the growth of an activist sensibility among conservative white Christians (as well as Orthodox Jews and charismatic Catholics) and the forces of prophetic black Christianity during the civil rights movement. Like Ralph Reed's appropriation of the rhetoric of cultural rights and recognition, such commonalities highlight a broader shift in the social organization of difference. Are indignant Christians in search of recognition really so different from indignant blacks, gays, or women in search of recognition?
Once black, gay, Christian, Jewish, and Latino identity politics are no longer separated from the broader milieu of mobilization, they take their place in this changing balance of particularism and universalism that has been eroding the old identity regime established in the postwar period. As much as any fundamental change in underlying values, there has been a shift in the institutional rules that govern the performance of identity in public.
Enshrined in a distinctive version of civil religion, that older settlement dictated the rules of politeness regulating the performance of ethnocultural loyalties and engagement with the larger plural society. As John Cuddihy chronicled in No Offense, during the post–World War II period the enlightened segment of each of America's major religions sought to tame the ferocious triumphalist forces within their ranks. For the no-longer-dominant protestants this meant giving up the exclusivist distinction of those "saved by Jesus"; for the Catholics it entailed jettisoning the notion of the "One True Church." And Jews had to tiptoe gingerly around the notion of "The Chosen People."[38]
These battles were more than simple contests of ideas; they were fought out by specific organized sectors of each religion in specific institutional settings—within and between the respective communities. Such universalism could take the most paradoxical twists, as organizations like the American Jewish Congress entered amicus curiae briefs that reinforced the wall of separation between church and state. Here was a distinctively "particular" kind of universalism—Milton Himmelfarb once called Jewish liberalism the Jewish particularism that likes to call itself universalism.
His mention of "calling" underscores the rhetorical aspect of this dynamic: none of this was purely "civic religion" in Robert Bellah's terms, Americans' earnest acceptance of a set of moral values. It involved something savvier and more streetwise, tempering the gauzy idealism of the metaphor of redeemer nation with a wily Goffmanian sense of pragmatic entente. Civic religion defined a set of linguistic rules, a way the various components of a plural society learned to talk (and not to
What proponents of shared culture miss, then, is not the fact of change but its character: not simply the growth of particularistic sentiments but also the erosion of restraints on consigning them to private life. Starting with the Black Power movement, there began an erosion of the civic culture vision that dictated, "Give no offense." In a spiral of mutual borrowing, groups became determined to parade their difference in the public realm.
One might argue that this institutional reading does not allay all anxiety about the divisive character of identity politics; it simply shifts the onus from the realm of free-floating values and personal attitudes. Nor do the parallels between prophetic black preachers and millennial white ones prove that identity politics is always benign. Proclamation of pride in one's religion or ethnicity, as certain versions of the fragmentation narrative argue, can slide easily into the rejection of the life lived in common, into provincial huddling with one's own kind, or even into mean baiting of others. Whatever its lofty rhetoric, multiculturalism has sometimes promoted what Richard Bernstein deems "a new orthodoxy exceedingly intolerant of disagreement.… [I]t invents … separate cultural worlds" and repudiates the idea of a "common cultural vocabulary" chap. 2). There really are Afrocentric partisans who believe in the essential deficiency of white "ice people, " queer theorists who laud the superiority of a unique gay sensibility, members of the Modern Language Association who view the American liberal tradition as mainly a fraud that masks white male domination, and deconstructionists who reject the idea of an American—or any other—tradition.
If identity regimes that hallow difference risk promoting fragmentation, overemphasizing such dangers carries risks of its own. Above all, it misses the fascinating paradox that characterizes American life as a whole in recent decades: the growth of organized expressions of particular identities has coincided with the growth of tolerance of difference, as well as of the respect and recognition that are crucial to liberal pluralism. Six related aspects of this seeming paradox temper fears of the fragmenting power of the current identity regime.
First, many assertions of ethnic and racial identities are reactive, less the result of coherent separatist values than a wounded response to the ethnocentrism of others. Long before people were worrying themselves about black tables, Latino tables, and gay tables, jocks, preppies, and
It's instructive to remember that Governor George Wallace was one of the pioneers of identity politics. How else to think about the Confederate flag dwarfing the American over the Alabama state house or the unapologetic way he wore cracker ethnicity on his sleeve and in your face? Indeed, Wallace's notion of a southern nation-within-a-nation preceded the black nationalist mantra of "Nation Time"; the red, black, and green of African liberation flags; the rap community's vision of the "Hip-Hop Nation"; out gays insisting, "We're here and we're queer"; up-front yarmulke-bearing Jews; and assertive Christians who want creches back in the public sphere. To the extent that black nationalism has varied historically with the indifference and hostility of the larger society toward black suffering, one could say that Wallace was a prime generator of black identity politics. At the least we cannot say we have gone from a past untainted by fractious ethnic sentiments to one awash in communal vendettas.
A second flaw in the panic over the danger of identity politics, the focus on the centrifugal forces generated by particular identities, ignores the institutional forces that modulate the exaggeration of difference and generate superseding commonalities. Even as certain gays, women, blacks, Jews, and others have been cultivating unique aspects of their experience, other centripetal forces conjoin them. Rejecting the "unexamined and fallacious premise in the narrative of fragmentation: that elevating a singular, shared American identity … is the only way to unify the nation, " Martha Minow emphasizes the institutional power of constitutional culture, crosscutting ties, and participation in a common culture of consumption to bind the nation chap. 3).
Third, fearsome scenarios of ethnic and racial conflict often confuse particularism with hostility to universalism. But as the Jewish case suggests, even a love of one's own kind elaborated in a vast array of ethnic self-defense organizations that promote Jewish interests and identity can coexist quite well with attachment to the central values of the larger society. West Indians, even as they may distance themselves from African Americans, switch among multiple identities, including black, West Indian,
This dynamic is highly visible in the religious sphere, as R. Stephen Warner has elegantly documented. In recent decades the cohesiveness of a shared civil religion has given way to a decentralized religious order, and the observant often assert "badges of religious identity—from the Christian label to the crosses, yarmulkes, and hijab coverings worn by today's college students." Yet these badges can mean quite different things. They "are increasingly asserted to invite recognition from the likeminded, embolden comrades, confound enemies, and invite inquiries from those open to persuasion." The main emphases here, reproducing and redefining the meaning of one's own identity, in no way "require antagonism toward one's neighbor." On the contrary, Warner concludes from the revitalization of congregational life among Jews, African Americans, and recent immigrants, "The new religious particularism may also help repair our culture."[40]
It follows, fourth, that worries about generic "particularism" pitch the debate at too high a level of abstraction. Such fears commingle distinct phenomena such as passionate feelings about one's ethnic or religious identity, the willingness to exhibit that identity in the public realm, rejection of shared values of the larger society, hostility to white society, and class resentment. For example, two warring sensibilities have claimed the mantle of multiculturalism. One, as proponents of the fragmentation narrative rightly point out, is separatist, fabricates mythic history, and is hostile to empathy. But the other carries forth the ideals of tolerance, robust debate, and empathetic universalism. Current academic battles to expand the canon, Lawrence Levine reminds us, repeat older struggles over the curriculum that accompanied the incorporation of "new constituencies of students among the middle and working classes, women, immigrants, and minorities."[41] This opening up and making way parallels the timeless pattern in American life: group bids for incorporation—Germans, Catholics—coexist with the individualism of the formal ideology.
In this latter sense, rather than promoting anti-American values the current identity regime is compatible with vital American traditions of pluralism and mutual respect. Philosophers may quarrel about whether liberal states must be neutral toward the content of various cultures, as Quebec refuses. But even if such states bear no duty to ensure the survival of specific subcultures, liberal universalism is consonant with according
"Consonant with" puts the matter too diffidently, which suggests still a fifth reason for calm in the debate on identity politics. Assertions of rights to cultural recognition also carry with them a certain universalizing momentum. A key dynamic of Jewish liberalism entailed the logic of what goes around comes around: affirming tolerance for all helped fashion tolerance for one's own kind and vice versa. Peter Steinfels captures this logic of reciprocity as it unfolded in the late 1990s at Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution, when students began to call for the restoration of crucifixes that had always hung in Georgetown classrooms. University officials, fearful of seeming to promote a medieval, uncivil Catholicism, demurred. Into the breach stepped Protestant, Muslim, and Jewish student organizations, which told the university chaplain, as Steinfels recounts, "The more Georgetown was specifically Catholic rather than striving for a generic religiosity—the more comfortable they felt being specifically Protestant, Muslim, and Jewish."[43]
The same kind of categorical imperative, an ethic of mutuality in which particular claims affirm the more universal right of other cultures to recognition, is playing itself out in delis across New York City, and elsewhere too, where Mexican employees come to greet their Korean bosses and cashiers with formal bows accessorized with Korean phrases and receive in turn the greeting, "Hola, Pepito."[44]
As this nod to heterogeneity indicates, all assertions of particularistic identities are not the same, and when we step back and look at the system as a whole, the dominant tendency has been toward expanding the boundaries of sexual, ethnic, and racial belonging, extending citizenship and rights to once-marginal communities, and blurring the sharp line between insiders and outsiders. This cumulative development is the sixth and most crucial rebuttal of the narratives of ethnic and racial fragmentation.
We can see this dynamic at work even in the realm of race, America's most troubled domain of difference. In truth racial life in the United States has long been too complex to conform to the frame of the "great divide between the races" favored during the Simpson trial, epitomized in columnist Scott McConnell's New York Post reflection, "The jury has spoken. Black America has done its celebratory end-zone dance; whites have gasped in astonishment. And the analysis has begun: ‘Two nations’; ‘different planet’; ‘racist police’; ‘jury nullification.’"[45] Ishmael Reed has wonderfully described this narrative frame "as Zebra journalism, where everything
Ethnic and class differentiation among blacks; the infusion of yellow and brown, olive and ochre, mahogany and taupe immigrants into the black-and-white mix; the complex patterns of ethnic distance and conflict between and among blacks and other "people of color" are rescrambling boundaries between the races and their meaning. It is even possible that for many Asian Americans and South Asians racial designations are becoming "ethnicized" in the minds of whites. The same may even apply to some upwardly mobile Latinos and Caribbean blacks. Spiraling rates of intermarriage across religious and racial boundaries further mark the birth of a new racial regime. As the 2000 census revealed, a rising proportion of younger biracial people not only refuses to pigeonhole its identities in the old restrictive classifications but is actively taking advantage of new opportunities to declare its membership in multiple "races."
Moreover, notwithstanding racially charged conflicts over social policy, the most ferocious forms of antiblack racism have diminished among whites, who, write Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, "no longer react uniformly to issues of race."[47] Black-white conflict has increasingly become shaped by class divisions and policy clashes rooted in ideological differences rather than racial animosity. Even as uttered in the racially resentful precincts of the white working and lower-middle classes, virulent language such as "niggers" and "black shit" is not always an unambiguous marker of racist hatred. As performed in the local context of vernacular speech codes, such terms—as distasteful as they may be—often reflect plebeian efforts to make intricate distinctions of class and character not readily apparent to cosmopolitan outsiders peering into such communities from a distance. More generally, the division between white lower-middle and upper-middle classes over issues of law and order originates not just in different levels of racial tolerance but also in class-based differences in language, in exposure to crime, in links to networks of acquaintanceship with victims of crime and police officers, and in conceptions of abstract rights and due process.[48]
The changing character of white identification with black crossover figures marks a similar erosion of racialism. It is true that even at the height of ideologies of unvarnished racism, plenty of whites enjoyed minstrelsy. Some cultural theorists interpret the current white adulation of figures such as Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and Will Smith—whom
Nor does black opinion conform to the stark unity suggested by the theme of Great Divide. The nationalist sentiments of one interviewee cited by political scientist Michael Dawson—"I'm tired of that one-nation-under-God boogie-joogie.… We are our own nation"[49]—represent a powerful strain of black opinion, but Dawson is at pains to stress the neglected diversity in black ideological life. Moreover, the very label of nationalism misses the variety of strains—from democratic to ethnocentric, from pragmatic to millennialist—encompassed in its reach. In another, less-than-enthralling instance of narrowing the gulf between the races, a considerable proportion of blacks accepts the negative stereotypes of blacks voiced by whites.[50] Similarly, strong currents of support for law and order and cultural conservatism course through black working-and middle-class neighborhoods.
Even African-American opinion in the Simpson case was not single-minded. Undeniably, there were blacks whose desire for racial payback fused admission of Simpson's guilt and exultant pleasure in seeing the black man "get over" or "get away with it." Yet many blacks who rejected the ethic of racial loyalty embodied in the practice of jury nullification disagreed with whites on how to read the evidence that entered judgments of reasonable doubt and the plausibility of police malfeasance.[51] This latter gap between the realm of ought and the realm of is, between moral convergence and empirical disagreement, has been emphasized by Jennifer Hochschild, who argues that even as they divide on some issues, blacks and whites enjoy broad moral agreement on a whole host of issues. Vast majorities of both groups agree that America should promote equal opportunity rather than equal outcomes and that trying to get ahead is key to "making someone a true American." Against the master image of racial fragmentation, Hochschild identifies the "strong foundation of shared beliefs and values on which to build an ethos of task responsibility" chap. 9).
Nor is it hard to detect assimilatory impulses among the new immigrants whom neonativists have dubbed defiant refusniks, standing aloof from American culture while exploiting its rich opportunities. Surely the new multiculturalism adds moral legitimacy to inchoate comfort with one's own kind, as do affirmative action programs, ethnic studies programs,
The presence of these forces makes even more impressive the "strong assimilationist impulses [that are unfolding] alongside vivid expressions of diasporic consciousness."[53] As the second generation forges its way in America, it is becoming increasingly clear that its members really do not look quite so different from previous second generations. Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut, among others, have documented the linguistic assimilation that is taking place.[54] Philip Kasinitz writes, "The out-marriage rate for second-generation Chinese Americans is already higher than it was for Jews a generation ago. Across the country, secondgeneration high school students prefer English to their parents' native languages, even if they voice strong ethnic identities, and many are losing their parents' language altogether."[55]
Even the identities of Asian American and West Indian reflect an oblique form of becoming American; crafted in the new land, responsive to its concerns, Latino signifies the gradual erosion of the specific identities of Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and the like. Such invented identities are a way station on the road to acculturation. It helps to recall that Italian immigrants didn't think of themselves as Italians at first but as something homier , not far from the idea of "homies" or landsman. The scope of identification was intimate: one's paisane from Abruzzi and Bari. Italians "became" Italians rather than Calabrese first in the eyes of the Americans who could not, as the saying goes, "tell them apart." Like every other word in the dance of identity, such American locutions have the quality of a forged identity; it's a way one learns to name oneself and be named by others.
As a result, just as immigration has long meant loss and yielding, it remains a story of opening up and self-making. This is why those whites
This exuberant process of cultural creation is embodied for Suro in banda music, but it well stands for the experience of Asians, South Asians, West Indians, and countless others: banda is "the sound of immigrants who skip across national borders, picking up music—corridos, hip-hop, rock and roll—wherever they go."[57] The same processes of fusion, melding, and syncretism are unfolding across the land and reconfiguring the cultural boundaries of the next generation.
That is not to say that there is not a good deal of alienation among many blacks and members of the second generation of immigrants. In truth, this is the source, both actual and potential, for much fragmentation. But such alienation, even when it takes a culturally separatist form, is rarely a simple reflection of preexisting attitudes about identity. Despite the media focus on its black component, the Los Angeles riots involved a broad-based class coalition of the enraged, linking African Americans, second-generation Central American gang members, the progeny of Mexican immigrants, and others. In the Crown Heights riots AfricanAmerican teenagers from the projects made common cause with alienated second-and third-generation Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Barbadians, and other West Indians; and all vented their rage against an array of targets.[58] And across the generation the sons and daughters of immigrants from many different lands are embracing rival visions of identity. In the case of immigrations from the Caribbean, an upwardly mobile, optimistic track clings to its West Indianness. A more alienated segment, generally less endowed with cultural capital and facing less attractive life changes, increasingly identifies as black.[59]
This pattern of splitting within the second generation underscores the embeddedness of identity formation in broader economic and demographic contexts. It also underscores the major failing of the conservative narrative of fragmentation, its tendency to separate the discussion of divisive tendencies and identities from the structural forces that give them shape and energy. Ultimately, whatever its complex causes, it is this
IDEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTATION AFTER FLORIDA: THE FRACTIOUS (BUT NOT FRACTIONATED) POLITY
Given that the eruption of cultural politics and anxiety over ethnic and racial discord have been hallmarks of American life in recent decades, it should not surprise us that we find in the electoral arena the same paradox evident in these other areas of American life: partisan vendetta and formal commonality, moral dispute and ideological convergence, liberalizing tendency plus conservative ascendancy. This mismatch between the flux of opinion and institutional design helps explain much of the volatility that has characterized the American political system over the recent electoral cycle.
The tendency to misread fundamental institutional shifts as marking shifts in popular opinion is natural enough. At the time, it seemed as if the 1980 Reagan victory marked a sea change in the basic cultural core of American life. To liberals, agape at the defeats of liberal stalwarts like Senator Frank Church, it felt like a radically unfamiliar moment had arrived. The entire postwar premise of a vital center that governed much political sociology was displaced by a frightening roar from some netherworld previously thought beyond the pale of post–World War II legitimation. Contributors to The Radical Right, the collection Daniel Bell edited in the late 1950s, may have recoiled from "the paranoid tendency" in American life, but they could rest easy that the paranoids were confined to a kooky fringe; they weren't knocking at the doors of government.
None of this assurance would endure. In an unwitting riff on the old theme of American exceptionalism, Jürgen Habermas's pronouncement in Legitimation Crisis—that quarreling about economic output, material rewards, and efficiency had replaced deeper questions of equality, moral values, and the character of the good society—seemed woefully anachronistic in the face of the invigorated ideological fervor.[60]
The liberal critique of Reagan's deflective Teflon coating and his bedazzlement through "smoke and mirrors" thus got it precisely wrong. Anticipating Clinton's formidable powers to marshal the resources of style, image making, and charm in the service of recrafting liberalism, Reagan artfully used his power to expand a constricted discourse beyond
The best evidence for a seismic shift was the realignment of social and economic policy, the restructuring of the judiciary and its spreading ideology of conservative judicial activism, the swerve in fiscal theory, and the revolution within administrative agencies that soon issued forth from the Reagan Revolution. These ideological currents found incarnation in symbolic totems like Rehnquist as the chief justice at the Supreme Court, Meese as attorney general, and Watt as secretary of the interior.
A natural folk form of reflection theory sustained the verdict of cataclysmic ideological change. How could there be such a reconstruction if not for a basic change in the hearts and minds of the voters, a plausible inference given credence by conservative and academic theories of realignment that had been swirling about ever since the rise of white backlash, the birth of the rubric of Middle America, and a discernable "emerging Republican majority"? (Indeed, an entire faction of the Democratic Party was prepared to junk much of the party's key ideological commitments in order to catch the wave of this new putatively popular consensus.) There was a naive democratic faith at work in this assumption, as if electoral demand mystically summoned an electoral supply to assuage it. The secular, much ballyhooed, trend of the collapse of 1960s liberalism, no longer obscured by the detour of Watergate and the Carter redemptive movement that countered it, had finally achieved electoral consolidation.
Such a faith operated with too neat a vision of harmony. The truth of advanced societies is that a good deal of slippage can occur among institutional sectors. And the institutional gauntlet—the configuration of elites, the rules governing primaries and the selection of convention delegates, other factors beyond popular opinion that determine the composition of party activists and their often disproportionate control over outcomes—tends to further weaken the direct relationship between a clear ideological signal of "the people" and the electoral outcome. As a result it is not surprising that the sphere of opinion—in this case a highly amorphous, pragmatic, and fluid "conservative" mood—could not claim the status of ideology. The Reagan years witnessed relatively little erosion in basic indicators of support for the welfare state. "The long-term trends in public opinion, " Paul Starr concludes, "show a general rise in liberal attitudes and beliefs during the 1960s and 1970s that has since leveled off but has not been reversed" chap. 12). "If American public opinion
In a pattern that would play itself out recurrently—most obviously during the 1994 surge of congressional Republicanism and the Contract with America but also throughout the impeachment crusade—conservatives continually misread the mood and overreached themselves, ignoring the fundamental pragmatism of the center, its eclectic populism that fused elements of conservatism and liberalism. This misconstruing of the popular meaning of the Republican victory was ironic (as well as self-serving). It was ironic because in heralding the popular mandate, the conservative theory gave short shrift to the organized grassroots campaign that produced it by rearranging the internal structure of primaries, displacing older regional elites in the party in favor of southern and Sun Belt ones, and generally creating a new organizational vehicle for populist conservatism.
Reagan was no fool in these matters; he knew the difference between majority and mandate, and he quickly learned to talk not about reducing government but about slowing its growth. And it is why the right's ancient language of "socialistic" Social Security, programs hungrily devoured by elderly Lockeans in Sun Belt strongholds like Phoenix and Jacksonville, suddenly vanished. Nor was Reagan taken by the forces of cultural restoration he exploited. On his occasional visits he'd give the National Association of Evangelicals a dollop of the idiom of evil.[62] But thanks to his own lukewarm feelings about the culture war and the survey data of Richard Wirthlin and his other pollsters, he realized that cultural polarization was not a viable national strategy, even if it helped convulse the Republican primary base. As early as January of 1982 major conservative leaders "warned President Reagan today that he was allowing ‘the abandonment, reversal or blunting’" of the culture war issues dear to them.[63] By the summer Conservative Digest was asking on its cover, "Has Reagan Deserted the Conservatives?" and noted "the growing conservative disappointment with the president."[64] After what the New York Times described "as a string of defeats on his proposals to legalize school prayer and ban abortion" and failure "to enact any of his agenda of legislation
A telling sign of paradoxical convergence was the evolution Reagan effected within the very structure and sensibility of conservatism. In effect, he domesticated it by removing the animus of resentment that has infused so many of its disparate strands. Weaning the right of its racism, anti-Semitism, and anticonstitutionalism, Reagan disavowed what Rogin once deemed "the punitive consequences of frustrated optimism, "[66] replacing them with a sunny Lockeanism. In Louis Hartz's terms he dispensed with the terror (of red scares, of evil internal enemies) in favor of enchantment (the Alger invitation). His own grace and humor, whatever its stylistic origins, was a rebuttal of Nixon's frowning ressentiment of George Wallace's sneer.
To bring the point home, one need only compare any of the generic law-and-order speeches of Agnew or Nixon with the expansive rhetorical community Reagan crafted over the course of his presidential speech career. The litany of heroes who remind us "what it means to be an American" included Lenny Skutnik and Sargent Trujillo, and they were joined in his 1985 State of the Union Address by West Point cadet and Vietnamese refugee Jean Nguyen and the Harlem founder of a home for the infants of drug-addicted mothers, Clara Hale.[67]
In a sense the right was shucking off the baggage of ethnocentrism and nativism, the better to distill the essence of ideological and class warfare into its most pure, virtually philosophic, form. The shift in sensibility found structural expression in the blurring of ethnic, religious, and racial boundaries that marked the emergence of an inclusive movement of right-wing mobilization. This "right-wing pluralism" required the end of "the attacks on racial and religious minorities that had disfigured evangelical political crusades of the past."[68] Such restraint was a necessary condition for the emergence of an alliance of former enemies—Orthodox Jews, charismatic Catholics, and fundamentalist Christians. Anita Bryant's Miami coalition, with its happy family of Orthodox rabbis and fundamentalist ministers, anticipated the erosion of these traditional doctrinal and denominational boundaries. Falwell's outreach to the Jews, given added intensity by the philo-Semitism of various wings of fundamentalism, reinforced the dynamic. All sorts of mutual overtures between prolife Catholics and evangelical Protestants added force to conservative ecumenicism
In the midst of ideological polarization the uncivil right was being incorporated
No matter how decorative and opportunistic, such a strategy of self-presentation honored an unspoken truth: liberals won the culture wars—just not on the perfect terms the most zealous longed to achieve, and with much of the loonyness removed, and with qualifications like "by and large." Most Middle American women might recoil at "those feminists, " but notions of a right to equal treatment, comparable worth, and much more now pervade the heartland of the nation. Ashcroft's avowal before the Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing that Roe v.Wade was settled doctrine and his invocation of a woman's "right to an abortion" on Larry King in February of 2001 attested to a similar state of affairs. Notwithstanding the vigilante militia right and the wackiness of the Waco-obsessed, the reborn right was at once a more fractious and more liberal right.
E. J. Dionne Jr. put the matter as presciently as anybody at the time, and he updates his basic argument here chap. 14). The proponents of wedge issues
posed complex matters of moral and social conflict in race, in family life, and in sexuality as false polarities, in either-or terms that did not speak to the amorphous center where the majority of American voters dwells.
In truth, America's cultural values are a rich but not necessarily contradictory mix of liberal instincts and conservative values.… Americans believe in social concern and self-reliance; they want to match rights and responsibilities; they think public moral standards should exist but are skeptical of too much meddling in the private affairs of others. chap. 14)
This was why that notoriously dealigned electorate, decreasingly channeled by party loyalty and surging about the polity, could shift its allegiance so quickly from Reagan and Bush to Clinton in 1992.
For the diminishing band of aficionados the culture wars simmered through the dark years, especially on talk radio, given new intensity by the right's visceral hatred of the Clintons. The Christian right could still complain that "no administration in history has so blatantly been against God's moral values legislatively and misused them more personally."[69] Such sentiments fostered the near-vertiginous triumphalism that attended
Yet it is the fleeting quality of both, not the triumphs of the Contract and the war on immigrants, that endures. Clinton's comeback in the 1996 election unveiled the limits of the Republican use of wedge issues to fragment the nation; like Pat Buchanan's frenetic performance at the 1992 Republican convention, Republican support for immigration restriction both in California and nationally hurt the Republicans in 1996. The burgeoning power of the strategically located Latino vote in Texas, Florida, and California gave an added impetus toward empathy.
This pattern continued through the 2000 presidential election. The Florida sideshow cannot obscure it. The stylistic surface of the story offers one version of proletarian romance: Bush, no striped-pants patrician, expunges the effete Ivy demons through self-invention—born again as a wildcat oil man, as a real hell-of-a-fellah, and finally really bornagain—as a Christian. The deeper story is the gravitational pull of a more liberal center, which played out in a series of inverted symmetries. The post-Clinton regime forced Republicans to play the onetime Democratic game of "taking back the center." Like 1970s and 1980s Democratic linedrawing between paleoliberals and neoliberals, all the Republican theorizing about compassionate conservatism reflected not some obsessive disorder but the changed political environment in which the party had to operate.
This was the import of Bush's denial of kinship with the congressional Republicans. It was as if Bush and his cronies had resolved to lock Tom
Still, no matter how cloying or contrived, no matter how much it could serve as a marketing strategy, compassionate conservatism took heed of the larger reality: of soccer moms and independent voters and Latino voters. Suddenly, the party of toughness and testosterone was the one that had to convince voters of its ethos of care, its ability to feel the other guy's—and woman's—pain. This may be preferable to the harsher versions of conservatism analyzed by Muñoz. Yet no matter how noble, it's hard not to look on the rhetoric of compassion with a modicum of skepticism, unless it's seen as a supplement to something larger. After all, faith-based forms of action run counter to the tested formula Skocpol has sketched for integrating Americans in some larger national community. As Paul Starr argues, privatization and faith-based initiatives fragment after their own fashion, splitting the nation into smaller units of private household and provincial congregation, of homogenous religion and distinct ethnicity. In the process such "soft fragmentation" deprives us of some broader sense of national community or legitimating ethos chap. 12).
As the nation moves beyond the faltering first steps into the millennium and absorbs the shocks of September 11, a powerful paradox will define the nation's cleavages and its efforts to modulate them. On the one hand, any current pattern of disputing always reflects underlying structural forces. And this much is clear: the vagaries of the global economy will create new winners and losers, distribute harm and largesse in not entirely foreseeable ways, and displace some groups and empower others. The radically shifting demography of the United States will similarly rearrange the character of our pluralism, the axis of our altercations. And the new geopolitical realities of a post–cold war world that includes demonic and perhaps less predictable threats of its own will further cut across familiar divides on foreign policy.
But this much is also clear: the narrative forms through which we seek to understand these changes have a kind of stubborn resilience, even if the meanings the forms convey are more fluid. For the moment, President
But this amalgam, as the Reagan experience reminds us, is as inherently unstable as it is familiar. Exuberant Republicans, buoyed up by their recovery of the Senate in the 2002 elections, will forget this history only at their own peril. For one thing, the cultural selection process is governed by an unforgiving logic of practical success; an ambivalent, pluralistic citizenry can respond to a range of appeals, as long as the basic needs of family, sustenance, and security are satisfied by the regnant policies. Second, much like the distinct ingredients from which it has been culled, the cultural mix embodied by the Bush administration speaks to only some of the nation's powerful impulses and not to others. In the end the contest between the forms is no less enduring than the idioms themselves: the rhetoric of moral redemption and the calculus of cost, the apotheosis of private life and the imperatives of community, the pursuit of profit and the more expansive community of rights. The cultural strains that momentarily have been pushed aside will reassert themselves, inspiring new cries and frictions. In the end this inescapable fact of fractiousness may be the ultimate form of constancy in a mercurial world.
NOTES
I thank R. Stephen Warner for his typically astute critical reading of this chapter.
1. The language of embeddedness and emergence comes from Ernest Schachtel's brilliant Metamorphosis: On the Development of Affect, Perception, Attention, and Memory (New York: Basic Books, 1959).
2. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1960; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).
3. Kevin P. Phillips, Post-Conservative America: People, Politics, and Ideology in a Time of Crisis (New York: Random House, 1982), 157.
4. See Jonathan Rieder, "Reflections on Crown Heights: Interpretive Dilemmas and Black-Jewish Relations, " in Antisemitism in America Today, ed. Jerome A. Chanes (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1995), 348–84.
5. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "The Uses of Anti-Semitism, " in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, ed. Paul Berman (New York: Delacorte Press, 1994), 217, 218.
6. Highlights from the November 1998 Anti-Defamation League Survey on
7. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Jews and the New American Scene (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 104–5.
8. Inge-Lise Ameer, "The Daily Dance, " CommonQuest, vol. 3, no. 4/vol. 4. no. 1: 36–39.
9. Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), 363.
10. Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 512.
11. Alan Wolfe, One Nation After All (New York: Viking, 1998), 283, 278.
12. See Michael W. Miles, The Odyssey of the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
13. See George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), esp. chap. 3 , "The Recovery of Values and Tradition"; and Jonathan Rieder, "The Rise of the ‘Silent Majority, ’" in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 243–68.
14. James Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1973), 312.
15. See, e.g., Jeffery M. Paige, "Political Orientation and Riot Participation, " American Sociological Review 36 (Oct. 1971): 810–20.
16. Stanley Greenberg, Middle Class Dreams: The Politics and Power of the New American Majority, rev. ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 5.
17. William Schneider, "What the Democrats Must Do, " New Republic, March 11, 1985, 17.
18. James Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 338.
19. No inherent logic of functionalist unity perfectly aligns the dynamics within each sphere. The degree of alignment or friction is historically variable. Thus during the civil rights movement, racial tension created opportunities for racist demagogues, who intensified conflict within the polity. On the other hand, the centrist dynamic of a two-party electoral system may modulate ethnic and racial fragmentation. Still, as we scrutinize examples from each of the three realms, we will encounter notable formal parallels.
20. See Molly Ivins, Nothin' but Good Times Ahead (New York: Random House, 1993), 236.
21. The poem appears at the start of Peter Viereck's famous 1955 essay, "The Revolt against the Elite, " reprinted in The Radical Right, ed. Daniel Bell (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), 161.
22. Fund-raising letter from national Moral Majority headquarters, August 14, 1980.
23. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: RightWing Extremism in America, 1790–1977, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 118.
24. For an early statement that dissects various paradigms of new right cultural mobilization, see Jonathan Rieder, "What Is the New Right?" in What Is Pro-Family Policy? Proceedings of the Bush Center Symposium on Family Policy, ed. Susan Munchow and Mary McFarland (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy, 1982); and Jonathan Rieder, "Crazes, Crusades, and Cockfights, " lecture delivered at Emory University, March 1983.
25. For an evocative portrait of the internal diversity in evangelical life, see Randy Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
26. See Public Opinion 4 (April/May 1981): 24–25. Although the summary reported that on "a limited set of social questions which touch directly upon family and home life and upon personal morality, " evangelical Christians are more conservative than nonevangelical Americans, "in part, this difference reflects the regional and class makeup of the evangelical movement. Southerners and those of lower social and economic status (SES) are more conservative culturally, and are more inclined toward evangelical persuasions" (24).
27. Ralph Reed, Politically Incorrect: The Emerging Faith Factor in American Politics (Dallas, Tex.: Word Publishing, 1994), 225.
28. Tom W. Smith, A Survey of the Religious Right: Views on Politics, Society, Jews, and Other Minorities (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1996).
29. James Davison Hunter, "The Evangelical Worldview since 1890, " in Piety and Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World, ed. Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1987), 52.
30. Smith, Survey of the Religious Right, 31.
31. Key leaders of the secular new right were quite open in the opportunism of their stoking of culture war issues. As A. James Reichley recounts, "‘The New Right is looking for issues that people care about, ’ observed Paul Weyrich, director of the right-wing Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. ‘Social issues, at least for the present, fill the bill.’" Because neither Weyrich nor two other key players, Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips, were Protestants, they began to cultivate friendships with important fundamentalists and evangelicals who might build a network of Republican Christian activists. See A.James Reichley, Religion in American Public Life (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), 319–20.
32. Jerry Falwell, Strength for the Journey (New York: Pocket Books, 1987), 276.
33. Reed, Politically Incorrect, 237, 65. This Christian version of identity politics offered one final parallel with the larger society from which religious traditionalists were said to be alienated. Far from an earthy resignation to human fallibility, the Protestant cultural critique brimmed with the classical Armenian strain in America's dissenting religious tradition that rejected the dour pessimism of Calvinist predestination. Just as Freud's existential pessimism was transmuted into a sunny technology of mind-cure in the United States, the bornagain ethos reflected not world-weary flight from the world but a faith in the possibilities of individual renewal and upward spiritual mobility. So the religious
34. The best estimates suggest that after Wallace Dean Muhammad broke with the Nation of Islam and its apocalyptic brand of Muslim racialism, Farrakhan retained only ten to twenty thousand followers in the Nation of Islam, whereas one hundred thousand adherents followed Muhammad toward a more conventional, nonracist Sunni Islam. See C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 390. For Wallace Muhammad's invitation to white people to join the Nation of Islam, see Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (New York: Pantheon, 1999), esp. chap. 19 and epilogue.
35. Jonathan Rieder, "Trouble in Store: Behind the Brooklyn Boycott, " New Republic, July 2, 1990, 16–22.
36. Joel D. Aberbach and Jack L. Walker, "The Meanings of Black Power: A Comparison of White and Black Interpretations of a Political Slogan, " American Political Science Review 64 (June 1970): 367–88.
37. One should not press the point too far. In a notable countervailing tendency the empathetic impulse can be glimpsed in a spate of studies of those supposedly decertified others—fundamentalist Christians, evangelicals, and Orthodox and Hasidic Jews—carried out by the very liberal, feminist, and even leftist social scientists who are supposed to be so eager to certify only their own kind. Lyn Davidman's Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Debra R. Kaufman's Rachel's Daughters: Newly Orthodox Jewish Women (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Faye Ginsburg's Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and Judith Stacey's Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late-Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Basic Books, 1990) all seek to understand the rich nuances and spiritual integrity of "alien" cultures without the presuppositions that have often deformed liberal cosmopolitan takes on exotic "others."
38. John Cuddihy, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (New York: Seabury Press, 1978).
39. See Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992); Milton Vickerman, Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chaps. 3–5.
40. R. Stephen Warner, "Changes in the Civic Role of Religion, " in Diversity and Its Discontents, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Jeffrey C. Alexander (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
41. Lawrence W. Levine, The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), xiv.
42. Michael Walzer, "Comment [on Charles Taylor], " in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 99–103.
43. Peter Steinfels, "Renewing the Forest: Catholics in the Multicultural Mix, " CommonQuest, vol. 3, no. 3/vol. 4, no. 1: 92.
44. See Hee-Jung Hwang, Fresh Market: Mexicans, Koreans, and the Making of a New Pluralism (unpublished undergraduate senior thesis, Department of Sociology, Barnard College, 2001). In this pattern of mutual recognition one can find a parallel in the realm of gender and sexuality. In the lamentations of the cultural right, American life has been fractured by moral relativism, antifamily feminism, and sexual promiscuity. At the same time, the ideals of comparable worth and a right to sexual gratification can be seen not as the legitimation of narcissistic pleasure but as an ethic of mutuality against a "fragmenting" masculinity that thinks only of its interests and pleasure.
45. Scott McConnell, "O. J. Fallout: Are We ‘Two Nations’?" New York Post, Oct. 11, 1995, 19.
46. Quoted in Henry Louis Gates Jr., Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (New York: Random House, 1997), 119.
47. Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, The Scar of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 34.
48. For a more detailed exploration of these issues, especially of the diverse motives governing white backlash, see Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
49. Cited in Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 90.
50. Sniderman and Piazza, Scar of Race, 44–45.
51. "Reasonable doubt has a history attached to it and a color, " writes Marcia Ann Gillespie in "Reasonable Doubt, " in The Darden Dilemma: Twelve Black Writers on Justice, Race, and Conflicting Loyalties, ed. Ellis Cose (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 107.
52. Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 111.
53. David A. Hollinger, quoted in Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration (New Haven, Conn., and New York: Yale University Press and Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), 185.
54. Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America, 2d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
55. Philip Kasinitz, "Children of America: The Second Generation Comes of Age, " CommonQuest vol. 4, no. 3: 35.
56. Roberto Suro, Strangers among Us: How Latino Immigrants Are Transforming America (New York: Knopf, 1998), 116.
57. Ibid., 123.
58. See Jonathan Rieder, "Crown of Thorns: The Roots of the Black-Jewish Feud, " New Republic, Oct. 14, 1991, 26–31; Peter Noel, "Crown Heights Burning, " Village Voice, Sep. 3, 1991, 37–40.
59. Mary C. Waters gives a good account of this splitting in Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), esp. chaps. 6 and 8.
60. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).
61. Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 28.
62. See, e.g., Reagan's remarks to the National Association of Evangelicals' Annual Convention, Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983, reprinted in Paul D. Erickson, Reagan Speaks: The Making of an American Myth (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 155–66. After telling the audience of his belief in "intercessionary prayer" and condemning abortion and sexual promiscuity, Reagan added, "There is sin and evil in the world, and we're enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might" (161).
63. New York Times, Jan. 22, 1982, A20.
64. Conservative Digest, July 1982.
65. New York Times, Sep. 25, 1982, 9.
66. Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Boston: MIT Press, 1967), 47.
67. See Kathleen Jamieson's discussion of this point in her Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), chap. 6.
68. Kenneth Wald, Religion and Politics in the United States (New York: St. Martin's, 1987).
69. Dr. Tim LaHaye, "The Clintonistas' War against God, " Family Life Seminars' Capital Report 8 (Oct. 1994): 1.