When Do Differences in Degree Becomes Differences in Kind? A Response to the Balkinization Symposiasts

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).

Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King 

We are grateful to all the contributors to the Balkinization Blog symposium for their serious and generous engagement with our book, America’s New Racial Battle Lines: Protect versus Repair, and to Jack Balkin and Mark Graber for their work in making it happen. We are also glad of this opportunity to address the points the participants raise, which can be organized under three questions.

First, aren’t the groupings which we call “racial policy alliances” and “racial institutional orders” concerned with more than just racial policies? Alexandra Filindra, Evan Bernick, and James Fleming and Linda McClain especially raise this question in diverse ways.

Second, are these policy alliances really novel or new? Rebecca Zietlow and Bernick suggest this question through their stress on historical predecessors, Fleming and McClain close with it, and Corey Robin presses it most strongly, with several useful specifications.

Third, are there issues on which we could and perhaps should have said more? Carol Nackenoff and Chloe Thurston provide valuable examples in this respect, and Zietlow and Bernick’s comments are pertinent here as well.

1. Racial Policy Institutional Orders.

The first question can be resolved, we believe, by clarifying just what racial policy alliances/institutional orders are and are not. They are coalitions of private and public actors and organizations that are parts of--and in some respects are both drivers of and are driven by--larger conservative and progressive political and legal movements, as well as the two major political parties in modern America. They are, however, not identical to or synonymous with those broader movements or political parties, and those broader movements and political parties are not the core subjects of our book.

These coalitions bring together in support of racial policies activists, organizations, and ultimately voters who often have other primary political concerns, but who see considerable common ground between racial policies and those concerns--so they join one or the other coalition. Consequently, in describing the members of the coalitions, we inevitably discuss the primary policy concerns that they see as connected—matters such as immigration, mass incarceration, housing, employment, health care, education, religious freedoms, gender, and sexuality and more. We include those policies as shaped in part by the clashes of the Protect and Repair racial policy alliances. So, our discussions do range beyond issues that are exclusively or even primarily racial.

Even so, we are still engaged in describing the racial policy coalitions that are our focus, not the broader conservative and progressive movements, not the current Republican and Democratic Parties, and not trends in public opinion.

Racial policy coalitions or alliances are, by definition, bound together by the agreement of their otherwise often diverse members on some basic racial policy stances. This means today  either the protection or bolstering of features in that status quo that privilege many white Americans in important ways; or the efforts to transform the highly inegalitarian institutionalized legacies of America’s white settler colonial origins, efforts many describe as a quest to “repair” America.

So, when Alexandra Filindra says we are really discussing rival visions of citizenship, when Jim Fleming and Linda McClain suggest that we are discussing “America’s battle lines more generally,” we cannot say that they are simply wrong. We are indeed discussing those things, but only as they relate to contemporary racial policy coalitions and policies. We hope that our work can aid scholarly efforts to build illuminating accounts of broader battles (Rogers Smith, for one, can certainly be counted on to draw on it when exploring today’s conflicting civic ideals!). Our theoretical framework of institutional orders offers one guide to how scholars might connect our account with these related studies, and we are pleased that these commentators do not seem to find it objectionable. How much can be achieved by deploying it further obviously remains to be seen.

2. What’s new?

Second, as Corey Robin notes, political developments always involve both continuities and changes, making it legitimately debatable whether truly important shifts have occurred. Robin, whose own work stresses what has been constant in conservative thought since the French Revolution, is a valuable skeptic of claims to meaningful changes in conservatism, and again, he is far from alone in perceiving at least as much continuity as transformation in the contemporary racial policy orders. Didn’t proponents of color-blind policies always complain about white victimization by race-conscious measures, against which they promised protection, with real political success? Didn’t they get support from openly white supremacist groups? Didn’t they support many policies we label as “Protect” measures, and didn’t many Republicans oppose some of the most extreme Trump protect policies, like retaining the names of Confederate leaders for military bases? While accepting that there has been a shift from color-blind v. race-conscious to protect v. repair, Fleming and McClain  query how “fundamental” this change is. Zietlow fairly emphasizes that we’ve seen backlash before in U.S. history, and continually since the civil rights successes of the 1960s. Bernick similarly stresses that battles over the “reactionary constitutionalism” favored by the contemporary Protect policy alliance are longstanding.

All reasonable points, and ones with which we wrestled.

We decided that emphasizing the continuities produces serious risks of underestimating both the political appeal and the policy dangers of today’s Protect racial policy alliance. It also obscures the new and severe challenges facing racial progressives today.

As we detail in the book, in our interviews both Protect and Repair advocates and organizations strongly affirmed to us their perceptions that fundamental changes have occurred. Many Protect proponents are bitterly angry at the moderate color-blind stances of the Reagan and Bush administrations, who accepted “expand the pool” diversity initiatives while opposing quotas. Today’s conservatives accuse them of failing to end affirmative action, of not preventing the rise of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices and programs in the public and private sectors or the inclusion of perspectives reflecting Critical Race Theory in public schools and museums. They are also condemned for their openness to primarily non-white immigrants and their choices not to give new protections to racially conservative religious traditionalists, primarily white Christian evangelicals. Many Repair adherents similarly view the older race-conscious agenda centered on affirmative actions to integrate people of color into existing American institutions as profoundly inadequate. Both sides see their 21^st century opponents as far more dangerous than their foes in the  late 20^th century.

We do not think they are wrong to do so.

Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court have eviscerated affirmative action in higher education and extended new special privileges to right-wing religious groups. He and his supporters are promising mass deportations, further privileging of conservative Christian evangelicals, censorious controls on public education at all levels, more intensive crippling of enforcement of traditional civil rights laws, bans on DEI that are meant to end “expand the pool” policies in both businesses and public institutions, renewed celebrations of Confederates and other racist leaders in American history, and much more.

These shifts are politically consequential.

Though it is true that some in the Reagan and Bush coalitions would have supported them, their candidates did not foreground those positions—and probably would not have been elected if they had. In contrast, Republican Donald Trump shouted them loudly and often, and it is not likely that he would have won in 2016 or 2024 if he had not promoted them so ardently. Many of his 2016 primary opponents deployed the same rhetoric for the same policies that Reagan and subsequent Republican candidates had adopted. By stressing his differences from them, Trump demolished them, before winning a narrow electoral college victory. Things had changed. These policy shifts also have had and are having tremendous impacts on the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Robin questions how fully Trump and the Protect coalition’s preferred policies are “ordering” American life, but we believe that America would be a significantly different and a significantly better country if they had never come to power.

We fully recognize that the Protect coalition does have internal diversity, and it is not completely identical to the Republican Party (though it now almost is). So, it is true that not all of Trump’s policy proposals (which we count as Trump policies) were or will be enacted. We also think that policies representing “multicultural conservatism” are likely to proliferate more than all-out white supremacist ones in the years ahead. But multicultural conservatism is not color-blindness. As its advocates explain, it permits some limited recognition of and distinct forms of aid to racial, ethnic, and religious communities, such as greater long-term funding for HBCUs and more expansive religious exemptions, so long as those communities support conservative social and economic policies and celebratory, not critical, perspectives on the United States. Those qualifications mean, however, that even multicultural conservatism operates to protect and preserve many of the advantages most whites have had under existing institutional arrangements. We, with Repair advocates, believe they therefore perpetuate many injustices.

But precisely because the Repair racial policy alliance genuinely does seek major changes in existing American institutions, seen as extending many of the unjust arrangements rooted in the nation’s founding as a white settler nation built in part on enslaved labor and the forcible displacement of the continent’s Indigenous peoples, it has struggled to make itself broadly politically appealing and to come up with feasible alternative institutions and policies. Using race-conscious means to integrate American institutions was never wildly popular, but it was far more acceptable to many Americans than presentations of their country as systematically racist and, especially, more palatable than calls for reparations. Some might therefore say that the Repair policy alliance, at least, will not prove enduring.

Yet the Repair critique of the inadequacy of the older race-conscious policy agenda is powerful and compelling; and inherited inequalities have regrettably become replicated cross-generationally Progressives may arrive at new formulations and policy proposals, and they are likely to back away from the most radical Repair positions, but they are unlikely to abandon the coalition’s basic themes and goals. Since the 2024 election, California has passed into law six of the recommendations of the state’s pioneering Reparations Task Force aimed at curbing discrimination and providing aid to Black homeowners and businesses, even as the Task Force’s recommendations for massive reparations payments have gone nowhere. It is likely that racial justice groups and agencies throughout the country will similarly pursue moderate Repair agendas for some years to come, combined with more inclusive economic appeals. It is not clear, after all, what else they might do.

3. Where and How to Look Wider and Deeper?

That uncertainty raises the third question, concerning topics on which we could and perhaps should have said more, and which in any case merit further study now and in the years ahead. While we hope that the spread of widespread violence, our sixth scenario for the future, is improbable, we entirely agree with Carol Nackenoff that the danger of such heightened violence is closely tied to the degree of prominence that white supremacists prove to have during the second Trump administration. White extremism and violence therefore need continuing attention. Though we tried, as Chloe Thurston urges, both to put the rival racial policy alliances into appropriate international contexts, and to address intra-coalition divisions and rifts, we agree that much more can and should be explored on these topics. We also agree that the impacts of these alliances on processes of political socialization and public opinion deserve study (by scholars more equipped than we are for those inquiries!).

As our earlier writings show, we are in much accord with the histories of earlier racial politics sketched by Bernick and Zietlow, and we certainly see further inquiries into how today’s politics relate to earlier episodes of backlash and constitutional conflicts as valuable and worthwhile. We think Bernick somewhat misapprehends us when we agree with some conservatives that America’s revolutionary origins have been seeds of transformative egalitarian movements, and when we say that the January 6^th insurrectionists engaged in lawless violence. The conservatives in question bemoan those transformative movements, while we applaud them, and we know that many invading the Capitol claimed to be upholding the Constitution, but we reject that claim. Bernick is absolutely right, however, that the issue of whether Aziz Rana is correct when he argues that truly transformative egalitarian changes cannot occur within the current Constitution’s bounds is a central one for the years ahead – both in scholarship and politically.

Similarly, Corey Robin is right to raise the question of whether truly fundamental transformations can occur if they do not involve major changes to the nation’s capitalist economic systems. As he and several other commentators note, we found much more evidence of rhetorical challenges than substantive ones in the positions of the current Repair racial policy alliance. Many Repair advocates would reply that their proposals for new initiatives in the areas of housing, employment, health care, education, environmental protection, and more, in some cases including direct reparation payments, would together amount to major changes in American capitalism. Although that claim is plausible, their coalition’s dependence on capitalist supporters does call into doubt how aggressively these changes will be pursued. In any case, few Repair advocates are currently emphasizing the (varied) sorts of proposals to achieve democratic control of the economy that were central to older Left agendas. We are not as convinced as Rana that egalitarian reforms are incorrigibly limited under the current American Constitution, nor are we as attracted as Robin is to the view that only economic changes should count as fundamental, though we recognize of course their massive significance.

But we agree that these are issues that deserve much further thought and study, especially if those sympathetic to the aspirations of the Repair policy alliance and its egalitarian predecessors are to have realistic hopes of defeating the forces protecting American systems of inequality, who are once again ascendant in American politics. We hope that our book, and this symposium, will contribute in some small measure to those much-needed endeavors.

Rogers M. Smith is Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylania. You can reach him by e-mail at rogerss@sas.upenn.edu.

Desmond King is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of American Government at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Nuffield College. You can reach him by email at desmond.king at nuffield.ox.ac.uk.