Racial Orders and American Political Development: International, Intra-Coalitional, and Individual Dimensions

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).

Chloe Thurston 

America’s New Racial Battle Lines: Protect versus Repair is the latest installment of a now two-decades-long collaboration between Rogers Smith and Desmond King to trace the “deep story” of American racial politics that undergirds American political development. Beginning with their 2005 article “Racial Orders and American Political Development,” (and influenced by each of the authors’ earlier work), King and Smith made the case that over centuries, American political development has been characterized by competition for governing authority and institutional control between two competing racial orders: one, committed to using government power to uphold white supremacy and the other, transformative egalitarian order, seeking to realize the revolutionary potential of the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence.  While the issues of the day may have shifted over time (from enslavement versus emancipation up to 1865, to de jure segregation versus integration of the 1890s to 1960s, to race targeted versus colorblind from the 1970s to 2010s), the institutional and electoral logic of American politics encourages this underlying pattern of conflict to persist. 

Smith and King’s new book extends this work to examine our current era of racial policy conflict. America’s New Racial Battle Lines argues that the liberal, race-conscious alliance of more recent decades has been replaced as of the 2020s by a “Repair” alliance tied together by a belief in the inadequacy of race-conscious measures given the pervasiveness of racial injustice throughout American history and into the present. The Repair alliance instead calls for “sweeping institutional transformations” in order to “repair what they see as the nation’s fundamental flaws” (4). Meanwhile, what was previously a conservative colorblind alliance has transformed into a conservative “Protect” alliance that is more likely to view anti-white racism as the most pernicious form of present-day bigotry, and to orient its adherents to the need to “to protect, and also restore, those characteristics of America and Americans that they regard as traditional sources of its greatness…[including, for many,] having always been a white, Christian, male-led capitalist nation” (5).

America’s New Racial Battle Lines brings an impressive wealth of data on the organizational landscape and connections between organizations within these competing camps. It provides further insight through interviews with 30 actors involved in these organizations and movements. This is a service to political science by again pushing the discussion of American racial politics beyond public opinion and measures of white racial resentment to understand the long coalitions of groups with intense policy preferences that operate across venues and time. 

On the Repair side, the authors trace the rise of new organizational alliances and networks working to reshape educational, criminal justice, and environmental justice polices, among other substantive areas, operating especially through local and state governments, and with some allies in Congress. On the Protect side, the authors join in recent efforts by Danial HoSang, Joseph Lowndes and others to understand the rise of what appears to be a growing conservative multiracial movement and helps to grapple with some of the twists and turns surrounding the apparent rising appeal of right wing populism among some groups of nonwhite voters. Binding together the rise of these new organizations on both sides of the new racial divides are the seismic economic shifts of the 1970s that gave rise to increasing wealth inequality and paved the way for philanthropic organizations in search of new tax advantaged places to invest their growing funds (chapter 3). 

Among this book’s many contributions is its depiction of the racial orders framework as one that can be evaluated against rival claims about the past and present character of racial politics and inequality in the U.S.: class-first or capitalist approaches, white hegemony approaches, and intersectional ones. (The authors also wade into the ongoing debates on racial capitalism, ultimately characterizing the framework as too ambiguous with regard to mechanisms and underlying premises to make its analytical uses self-evident.) The exercise of walking through the alternatives reveals once again the value of tracing alliances, actors, stated commitments, institutions, ideologies, and material concerns over time, over leading with these theoretical priors. This is not to say that these rival perspectives are misguided. More often, Smith and King find evidence sometimes in support of the expectations of different rival perspectives and often not enough evidence to allow us to refute any of the rival explanations wholesale. In short, Smith and King rightly point out the limitations of grand narratives, in favor of a careful delineation of ideas, institutions, commitments, that an orders-based approach leverages institutional features of American politics to explain why we see these issues persistently reemerge on racial lines. 

There is much to like about this book, and yet I am also left with a few lingering questions that it raises for future APD scholars (or, potentially, for the next iteration of Smith and King’s long collaboration). The first set of questions has to do with how APD should consider the U.S. in international context. The second set of questions focuses more inwardly on how to think about intra-coalitional dynamics, voters, and political socialization. 

First, how might we adapt an orders-based approach oriented and developed with explaining domestic political formations and conflicts, to a transnational and international organizational and ideological landscape? I’m not the first to point out the transnational dimensions of domestic racial politics, as Debra Thompson’s case for interactive political development makes clear. But both alliances have been influenced by (and themselves have influenced) international movements and ideologies, as well as by events (including climate change, war and political violence, migration, and a the COVID-19 pandemic) that do not end at national boundaries, raising important questions about how to reorient APD frameworks that are often domestically-focused. 

Second, while the authors are careful in characterizing the diversity of actors, programs, and ideas contained within each alliance rather than depicting either as monolithic, future work might linger on the intra-coalitional dynamics. What factors drive some actors, groups, and policy ideas represented within the broader coalition to be dominant and others less so? Smith and King seem to suggest at times that the need to appeal to enough voters or to resonate with broader American cultural commitments may shape some factions’ success or failure. Some organizational actors themselves may want to avoid association with the most unsavory elements within their coalition – a reason for why they believe multiracial conservativism is ultimately likely to win-out over a more extreme White Nationalist Conservatism (chapter 10). But is this right? Scholars of interest group politics frequently note that groups can move policy towards the extremes outside of the preferences of ordinary voters. 

More focus on intra-coalitional dynamics may also provide new insights into other material dimensions that may shape the range of actions and positions taken on behalf of these alliances: How do material factors shape intra-coalitional politics and policy priorities? Or at the very least, what do they reveal about what underlies those priorities? That Evanston, Illinois’s reparations program was funded through a brand new tax source rather than an existing one suggests something about how policymakers viewed the potential distributional challenges of repair policies. As Jared Clemons shows in his work, white liberal anti-racists’ reduced support for policies that would tangible reduce racial opportunity and wealth gaps when it threatens their familial capital reveals something about the depth of commitment to this agenda. Similar questions can be asked about the role of material factors in shaping the direction of the Protect alliance, particularly when it comes to reckoning with the costs of Trump’s immigration positions if realized. 

Third, and finally, it is worth considering the consequences of America’s new racial battle lines for political socialization. APD tends to focus on institutional development and change but it may be worth bringing voters and the mass public back in as a source of reproduction and change in these racial policy alliances. We might want to think more about how these conflicts and their outcomes across different levels of government and in different venues shapes individual orientations and behavior. This is especially true given how much fights over racial orders take place in schools and churches. None of this is new, as work by Ursula Hackett reminds us. But there is also evidence that these new racial battle lines are shifting how at least white parents talk to their children about race. Further connecting the institutional and organizational to the familial and individual may represent a the new frontier in terms of understanding other factors that help to reproduce but also change America’s racial battle lines. 

Smith and King end on a note of, well, not exactly optimism. In describing six possible futures of these new racial battle lines, they do rank the worst outcome (an escalation of race-related violence in the U.S.) as the least likely – though, as the authors confess, this is based more in hope than any objective assessment. I hope they are right. In the meantime, zooming out to the international and in to the intra-coalitional and individual should give us more purchase on the past and future of America’s racial battle lines. 

Chloe Thurston is associate professor of political science and Institute for Policy Research faculty fellow at Northwestern University. You can reach her by e-mail at thurston@northwestern.edu.