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 5th 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.