Is This Battle Royale?

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization Symposium on Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King, America’s New Racial Battle Lines: Protect versus Repair (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Carol Nackenoff

I reflect on America’s New Racial Battle Lines: Protect Versus Repair with the election of 2024 in the rearview mirror, but not its consequences.  Pro-reparations U.S. representatives Cori Bush (MO) and Jamaal Bowman (NY), elected to Congress in 2020, were both unseated in Democratic Party primary challenges in 2024. The Trump Republican Party not only won the White House but now boasts majorities in both houses of Congress to accompany its majority on the Supreme Court. The new president seeks to weaken institutional checks and balances in pursuit of his goals, which include going after "Radical Left Lunatics" who have "worked so hard to destroy our Country" (Trump, Thanksgiving message, 2024). The 2024 election is likely to have profound consequences for America’s racial policies, with clashes intensifying. Rogers Smith and Desmond King offer up a highly useful guide about what to expect with regard to racial politics and policies for at least the next several years. America’s New Battle Lines also gives readers a sense of what opposition projects will probably continue to look like, beyond resisting Republican initiatives. The relevance of the book extends to policy alliances that go beyond race: “both policy alliances have linked their racial positions to a wide array of other concerns” (279).

Smith and King contend that the decades-old cleavage that pitted proponents of affirmative action against proponents of a color-blind Constitution has now morphed, creating new institutional orders in their wake. “America’s conservative racial policy alliance has shifted rightward, from color-blindness toward white protectionism, though with the possibility that it may rest on multicultural protectionism.” And “America’s liberal racial policy alliance has moved leftward, toward systemic racial equity initiatives commonly called ‘reparations’ . . .” (20).   In this story of American political development, Smith and King recognize that the Protect alliance has the considerable advantage, and that it might prevail for some time, in part because of fragmented structures of power and biases of its representative institutions (e.g., the Electoral College, the Senate, both favoring rural and more conservative voices).

America’s New Racial Battle Lines reminds readers that political ideas play an important place in political development. This will not be news to readers of Smith and/or King. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are central to political life, and the authors do a great job in characterizing the major stories told by those in both the Protect and Repair alliances. I found Ch. 4 on ‘The Conservatives’ Story” quite compelling, and better than other scholarship I have read on the worldviews of various branches of the conservative movement in the Trump era as these views engage the race issue.  Their emphasis on the story of America’s modern decline is excellent, and it was a recommended read for students in my lifelong learning class on Election ’24. This story, as Smith and King tell it, is that “America at its birth and in is core, was always exceptional, but now radicals are destroying it, so strong leaders must protect the nation’s good people against those radicals on every front if America is even to survive, much less to be great again” (123).

Policy alliances and social movements inspired by ideas are certainly too weak at times to constitute institutional orders. Yet the authors point out where both Protect and Repair alliances have footholds in governing institutions at various levels of the American state. In the first Trump administration, the conservative racial policy alliance became an increasingly powerful institutional order. And to illustrate how racial conservativism is linked to many policy regimes, Smith and King link the Protect agenda not only to affirmative action, civil rights enforcement, immigration, and various cultural conflicts, but also to voting, policing, housing, schools, and regulatory and economic issues.  Such policy interconnections also exist for the Repair agenda, but the authors admit that the progressive alliance can point to far fewer governing officials and agencies where they have a beachhead—even under President Biden.

The center section of the book devotes equal attention to Protect and Repair forces, recognizing that the former are better funded.  Smith and King explore the rise of each order, the conservative story and the repair story, funding sources, networks, current major initiatives of each, and how they have permeated various institutional orders. They point out where those loosely within each of the two alliances part company.  Smith and King note a shift among conservatives away from an earlier emphasis on free market and libertarian principles that had attracted major donors, toward newer attacks on liberal racial, cultural, and identity politics. The transformation of American tax law and rules governing 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 organizations have been especially helpful to the emerging Protect alliance.  The authors place a great deal of emphasis—perhaps a bit too much—on HR 40 (which proposes a Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans) as the centerpiece of Repair alliances. Yet the authors do also give a good sense of the rich array of measures at state and local levels designed to repair a legacy of racial injustices that draw upon both public and private resources, even if few public resources have actually been redistributed to date.

Smith and King have drawn on speeches made by candidate (2015-2016) and President Trump, and statements on federal websites having to do with race during the first Trump presidency. They compiled lists of organizations supportive of Protect and Repair policy agendas and worked to map linkages among some of the major groups on each side of the divide.  The authors also conducted a limited number of semi-structured Zoom and email interviews with progressive and conservative racial policy advocates and analysts from some of the organizations identified in the book; these interviews provided vivid, valuable evidence on their worldviews and on beliefs that racial policy disputes had become more polarized (for which each blamed the other side).

The final chapter offers a short perspective on conservative and ethnonationalist movements and racial equity and repair initiatives outside the United States, but the heart of the chapter offers six scenarios for future directions in U.S. racial politics—in the order of what the authors consider most likely.  Several assume a liberal victory in 2024 (considering race-class coalition-building, working class progressivism, and a broad, intersectional Repair alliance). I focus, however, on those on the conservative, Protect, side given the 2024 election results. The first—which was the authors’ most likely scenario overall when the book went to press—imagines a multi-ethnic or multi-cultural conservativism that eschews white nationalism.  The third in order of likelihood offers a more extreme version of the Protect agenda, with white nationalism, Christian nationalism, and anti-immigrant fervor coming to the fore in state and national politics.  Which are we most likely to get with Trump? The president-elect’s victory speech of November 5^th would appear to fit the first scenario: “[My supporters] came from, they came from all quarters. Union, nonunion, African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Arab American, Muslim American, we had everybody and it was beautiful. It was a historic realignment. Uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense.”  If Trump governs with an eye to building a coalition that includes a substantial share of Latino voters, this might be the most likely scenario. Yet the Trump who has demonized immigrants, mobilized young male voters with machismo, gained the sometimes worshipful support of Christian nationalists, who has sometimes refused to denounce white supremacy, and who now denounces enemies within (an amorphous group that includes liberal and progressive Democrats, Black Lives Matter protesters, and D.E.I. proponents)—could well lean toward and support this more exclusive vision of America.  Smith and King offer, as their most bleak but least likely scenario (#6)  the escalation of race-related violence, and note that the Protect alliance has far more incendiary figures and groups ready to resort to violence than does the Repair alliance.  It seems to me that scenarios 3 and 6 are far from mutually exclusive.

Despite nominations and appointments that portend the emphasis on grievance politics and a determination to hobble or dismantle a number of government institutions detested by the Right, it remains too early to know which Protect scenario is most likely to prevail.  The stakes are high.  Will the battle lines identified by Smith and King produce a Battle Royale? 

Carol Nackenoff is Richter Professor of Political Science Emerita and Senior Research Scholar, Swarthmore College. You can reach her by e-mail at cnacken1@swarthmore.edu.