- Today we're launching
into pod four of the course, The Politics of Insecurity. And that's gonna preoccupy
us in the next two lectures. Let's start by going back a few years, before the real backlash starts in. This is 2011. - Today is the Tea Party
movement's biggest day. It's the day people are most frustrated with their government,
when they're sitting down and writing those checks
to the IRS and thinking, why am I paying all this money? Today really highlights
the Tea Party's message that politicians here in
Washington are just out of control. - They are fed up with Washington, and sick of runaway spending. (crowd clapping and cheering) And at Tea Party rallies across
the country this weekend, there were plenty of Republicans
fighting for their support. - Let's send them this message. Don't tread on me. - Real solidarity means coming
together for the common good! This Tea Party is real solidarity! (crowd yelling) - Some, like former Alaska
Governor Sarah Palin, and Minnesota Congresswoman
Michelle Bachmann are Tea Party favorites. - They've been very
exciting, very encouraged, about my potential
candidacy and I'm excited to be here with them. - And not to be left out,
billionaire businessman Donald Trump made his first appearance at a Tea Party rally. - We have a man right now, that almost certainly will go
down as the worst president in the history of the United States. - No one knows if Trump is serious. But some early polls have him on top for the Republican nomination. He's gotten attention with his questions about whether President Obama
was born in the United States. A widely discredited issue other Republican
contenders have discarded. But in playing to the Tea
Party, the potential candidates also will have a challenge. Recent polls show 47% of
Americans have an unfavorable view of the movement. So candidates looking for Tea Party votes have to be careful not
to alienate moderates. - That's what the White
House is sure hoping, that all of these Republican
presidential candidates are out there, and sort of
waving the flag of the Tea Party. And they believe that that will
turn off independent voters. - Now this movement, of course,
started just two years ago. So this'll be the first
presidential campaign these Tea Party voters
can try to influence. And we of course, don't
know what kind of impact they will have in the fight
over the Republican nomination. But some of these candidates are assuming that they're going to need
these Tea Party votes to win. - So that was 2011, two
years after the advent of the Tea Party. People still didn't quite
know what to make of it. It had been quite a
successful lobbying group in Washington in
producing major changes in the Obamacare bill that had
been passed the previous year. But it still was very unclear
what sort of electoral force it was going to be. Today's agenda is to
really explore the economic demographic and cultural
sources of the 2016 backlash. And the larger puzzle of
resurgent identity politics. The political sources
of these developments are gonna be deferred
until Thursday's lecture. And today we're really
going to be thinking in terms of my ideas,
interests and institutions. We're really gonna be
thinking about the tensions and complementarities
between interest and ideas in the evolution, I
should say in the origins and evolution of the backlash. So I want to begin by digging
a little more deeply into the Tea Party ideology
that you saw being appealed to there by going back to the
very start of the movement. And this is an anti, tax rally in 2009, September of 2009. (bright piccolo music) - Most of those there would
have called themselves patriots. That don't tread on me
flag was an early symbol of the American Revolution, who argue that their government today is betraying traditional principles. Steve Butler, a physician from Indiana, was handing out copies
of the Constitution. - If you read the quotes
of Thomas Jefferson, these guys were conservatives. And they said that the control
should be with the people and not with the big government. - Iliana Johnson came
to America from Romania some 30 years ago. - I find myself now every
morning when I wake up, what kind of freedom have we lost today? - You could also find plenty
of signs of something else. A rage that identifies President Obama with Hitler, or Stalin, that
questions his citizenship. That seems to celebrate the
death of a famous liberal. And among the main currents
of the protestors here, a conviction that the media,
Fox News and Talk Radio accepted, are deliberately
concealing the truth. - Yeah, they're blocking it out. I mean we know it, everybody knows it. - You see these people back here? They all know there's something happening, but the mainstream media,
they don't tell it. - It's your freedom!
(crowd yelling) - But perhaps what most
united these protestors was a broader discontent. A sense that they are not being heard. That their interests and
the nation's interest are in the hands of a few. Dawn Newman came up from Texas. - It's all a good 'old boy network. You know they don't care what we think. Everybody's in everybody's bed, you know? And everybody's pocket. And it's who's got the most money. It's all about greed and power. - So there you have, I
think in a very tightly distilled form, the four major elements of the Tea Party outlook or ideology. One is this very staunch, anti-elitism. The sense that the political establishment and the economic establishment, are reflected in both political
parties is fundamentally opposed to the interests
of people like themselves. Secondly, lots of conspiracy
theories floating around this movement and you
saw some of them there. Conspiracies among the media
to conceal what's going on, being central among them. Third, hostility to
taxes and to government, especially to the federal government. And this sort of harkens
back I think to the Edsel and Edsel that I talked
to you about some weeks ago. The connection between
the anti-tax movement, and typically for ethnic minorities. And you see these things
go together there as well with the racism, questioning
President Obama's citizenship, and so forth. And we're gonna come back
to the view of the world that these four elements
constitute later in the lecture. But let's first talk
about the economic sources of the backlash. And so, this is a little bit of review of things I've told you before. But then some addition to it. Last week I pointed out
that one of the sources of the anti-elitism in the backlash was the divergence that on the one hand, after the financial
crisis, people connected to the financial sector, or with
significant financial assets, had their fortunes turn
around pretty quickly. And by 2016, 2017 all
the major stock markets were basically back and much of the wealth that had evaporated, or
had appeared to evaporate during the financial crisis, had pretty much been
restored for those people. But that there was very different impact on the real economy. And when I showed you these
slides first about unemployment that more people were
unemployed for longer, both in terms of short term unemployment, and longer term unemployment. And that this didn't show
signs of ending any time soon. Indeed the long term unemployment
rates were the highest at least since the 1950s. I talked about the impact
of the housing crisis, the very high level of foreclosures. And then in a separate
lecture, I talked about the disparate racial impact
of the housing crisis. So just building on some of that. If you look at what happened to real wages in many of the advanced countries. But we're gonna focus today on the US. You can see that this is real wages, changes in real wages, between 2008 and 2017. And you can see it's very, very modest. So real incomes in the US
grew by over that period by about 6% total. Not very much at all. And, if you look at who
benefited from the revival of the economy, even though
the growth was pretty slow, we had big increases
in productivity growth. That's the top line over there. But if you look at hourly
compensation with wages there's two different measures of it, some technical differences
that need not concern us here. You can see that the
returns to the increases in productivity were not
going to hourly wage workers. And this is part of the
Pacetti story that returns to capital greatly exceed the
returns to labor over time. So it's a period of wage
stagnation for people earning hourly wages. This decade, or eight
years if you like after the financial crisis. Then, if we zoom out a little bit further into the larger context of
long term employment insecurity this has been building for decades. I talked in an earlier
lecture about the decline of union membership, which
you can see beings pretty much right after World War II. That's the blue line there,
declining union membership, where as the share of
income going to the top 1% is flat through about the 1970s. But then starts to take
off pretty dramatically. If you look at union membership falling and middle class incomes, they
pretty much fall in tandem. So with the middle class share of income, as workers get less and less leverage, also has been falling for decades. This is another slide I showed
you relatively recently, this is the job insecurity of
the late baby boom workers, workers born between 1957 and 1964, by age 52 have changed jobs 12.3 times on average. Very big levels of employment insecurity. And again, zooming out even further, this is again the story
that's highlighted by Pacetti, his co-author Siaz and many others that we have had this very
high levels of inequality that were in the Gilded Age. And people by the end of World War II, thought were going away,
in fact have come back. And we're now at the same
levels of inequality that haven't been see for more than a century. And this is of course
what partly motivated the Occupy Wall Street movement, which I will have more to say
about in a future lecture. And the Bernie Sanders insurgency
in the 2015-'16 primaries. And to give a sense of
what the Sanders campaign was all about, let's go look at him, or listen to him for a minute
a couple of years before he decided to run for President. - Today, the wealthiest
400 individuals in America own more wealth than the
bottom half of America, 150 million people. 400 and 150 million. Today, and this is really quite amazing, the six heirs to the Walmart fortune, the Walmart company of
course started by Sam Walton. His children, one family,
now own more wealth than do the bottom 30%
of the American people. One family, owns more
wealth than the bottom 30%, 90 million Americans. And I know we have some of
my colleagues coming up here and saying, "Look not everybody
in America's paying taxes. "Got millions of people are not paying "any taxes," no kidding! They don't have any money,
'cause all of the money is on the top. - So, that was the economic
story and the outrage that Sanders is articulating there. He, on an interest based
story one would anticipate that this would resonate
with large numbers of voters. And we've seen in this that the damage that has been done,
was not just to white voters, but to African Americans
disproportionately and Hispanics during the housing crisis. And on an interest based
story, one would expect that this was an opportunity
to build a coalition that one would have anticipated would do something about that. But, life has more imagination than us. What this story missed is
what I'm gonna spend most of today's lecture talking about, namely the demographic
and cultural sources of the backlash, which
have also been building in different ways for a very long time. But before we dig into
that, I want to first make one point that I think is a symptom of the fact
that this story is perhaps a little bit too simple. At least as I've told it this far. And I'm referring here to the fact that employment insecurity is not just about working class voters. This very important new
book by our colleague in the law school, Dan Markovits called, "The Meritocracy Trap." A big part of Markovits'
message in that book is about the so-called hollowing
out of the middle class that many occupations that
used to be middle class occupations of upwardly mobile people are disappearing either offshore. Or more importantly to technology. So, if you think about
we talked about bankers giving mortgages awhile ago. If you wanted a mortgage, the
person giving you the mortgage was a local bank manager
who had worked their way up to that position. It was a stable job. You would go down and have
meetings with that person. They might be a neighbor of yours in a middle class community. Today when you apply for a
mortgage it's to Quicken Loans, you do it over the phone
to somebody who probably has a high school education. Maybe not even, on the
other end of the phone, might not even be in the United States. They type your characteristics and economic
data into a software program, an off the shelf software program, and you get the answer as to
whether or not you're eligible for a mortgage in a matter of minutes. The bank manager who
would have interviewed you about your mortgage has
long since disappeared. Those jobs have gone away. So it's not just the bank
tellers, it's the bank managers. And it's creeping, this
disappearance of employment is creeping up the occupational ladder. I, for the last seven years
now, have been teaching at the Yale School of Management. Seven years ago, one
of the most attractive things to do for people who were graduates of business schools, was to
go into investment banking. It's not a favored activity anymore, why? Because a lot of those
jobs are going to big data. There are algorithms now that
make is much less appealing to go there, but then the question arises what are these people going to do instead? So we should when we think
about employment insecurity we shouldn't just focus
on the disappearance of industrial jobs that force people into low paid service sector work. And if you want another data point that tends to support this. If you look at primary voters
for Donald Trump in 2016, I'm not talking about the general election when you would expect
most Republicans to vote for whoever the candidate was. But primary voters, when
they had many other choices. They don't fit the stereotype
of Joe lunch bucket. So if you look 1/3 of
the Trump primary voters earn less than the median income. That's less than $50,000
is the median income for a family of four in
the United States in 2016. Another third earns between
$50,000 and $100,000. And the third third
earned more than $100,000. So 2/3, by most definitions
of working class, 2/3 of Trump's primary supporters were not working class voters. So, there's obviously
something much more complex going on here than the stereotypical image of who the Trump voter was. And it was something
that I think the sort of Bernie Sanders kind of analysis, didn't capture at all. And I think that that's what we have to try and understand with some other tools. Now, two very interesting scholars, one a sociologist by the name of Arlie Hochschild, and
another political scientist by the name of Kathryn Cramer, had spent the five years
leading up to 2016, engaged in ethnographic
studies of angry white voters. We'll talk more about
Hochschild in a minute, she studied and lived with
oil workers in Louisiana. Cramer studied rural workers in Wisconsin, which she was trying to understand the rise of Scott Walker. Cramer's book is called "The
Politics of Resentment." And what was interesting about these, both these books is that they, the research for them
was really done before the advent of the backlash
we're really studying now in the years leading up to 2016. But they shared a lot of light on it. So, Hochschild's book,
"Strangers in their Own Land," is based on this five years
she spent in Louisiana with oil workers who had
been downwardly mobile. Many of whom had lost their jobs. Their communities had often been savaged by the environmental
effects of the industry within which they were working. Lakes which they had fished in as children were now so polluted that the fish in them were all long since dead. There were very high levels of cancer and other diseases that
were widely attributed to the pollution in the community. Large numbers of people had been laid off, because of mechanization of the industry. And yet, the paradox that
she tried to understand was what that the anger
of most of these people was directed not at the oil companies, but at the government. And particularly at
the federal government. And she tried to understand this through participant observation. Here's a summary that she
gives of the central finding in her book. - I stuck upon something
I call the deep story. Which is a story that feels true. You take the facts out, you
take the moral judgements out and have a picture, a
metaphor for what goes on. In this, people are waiting in line as in a pilgrimage to the top of a hill where there's the American dream. People have been waiting
in line a long time. They feel deserving, their feet are tired. The line hasn't moved in many years. And then they see, some people
cutting in line, who's that? That would be blacks, who
now have access to jobs that used to be reserved for whites. That's women now have
access to jobs reserved formally for men. Immigrants and refugees,
and now endangered animals all seem to be getting ahead
of you, having cut in line. Then, people notice Barack Obama, a representative of
the federal government, seeming to wave to the line cutters. He's sponsored them. Indeed the federal
government comes to seem like an instrument of their marginalization. It has indirectly put them back. You're now at the back of the line, and no one's really
paying attention to you. And then someone ahead
of the line turns around and says, "Oh you're a
Southern, ill-educated "Bible thumping redneck." And then you feel estranged. There's a moment which you feel like now a stranger in your own land. And you're kind of stuck until
one day someone comes along, a magisterial figure, powerful, who sees and recognizes
your estrangement and says, "I'm gonna give you your
country back again." - So, this is this
narrative of cutting in. There's some notion
that people are getting ahead in line in front of you. And therefore preventing
you from advancing. If you read the whole book it is a story of felt humiliation and rage at this phenomenon. And so, when you think about the reasons for their
dislike of the government, first that they perceive the government of an agent of this cutting in, as the principal agent and
facilitator of this cutting in. And then, if they need
help from the government, because they lose their jobs, they have to go and be
interviewed and be humiliated by people who have job security, who have government pensions,
who might well not be white. And so, it reinforces this
sense of victimization. That feeds this narrative
of cutting in and what Cramer calls the politics of resentment. I think it's important, this
was a study done in Louisiana, but Cramer's is in Wisconsin. And there's since been
five or six other books. So this is not just a
phenomenon about the South. And I think that's
important to understand. It's really a much larger phenomenon. The story that Cramer
tells is very analogous. That rural voters in Wisconsin have many of the same resentments,
and many of the same causal stories that they tell themselves, about the sources of
their failure to advance, and the sources of their alienation. And one other thing in
the Hochschild comments that I just want to highlight
and I'm gonna come back to. Is that she noticed when she
described the cutting in there she said, "Cutting in,
African Americans are now "getting jobs that were
formally reserved for whites. "And women are now getting
jobs that were formally "reserved for men." And so this raises the whole issue people's implicit baselines. When poor whites of this kind think about something like affirmative action, they see this as somebody being given an unfair advantage, a leg up. But they can not perceive that
this is a remedial response to a kind of advantage
that they had in the past. So a very important book on this subject by Ira Katznelson, at the
Columbia Political Science Department called, "When
Affirmative Action was White." About the advantages that
whites previously enjoyed that now have been eroded or taken away. As I said the question becomes,
what is one's baseline? And this feeds if you
like what I'm gonna call irreconcilable narratives about the nature of what's going on the country. Because the people from whom
the traditional advantages have been taken away can't
see that in the sense that the fish can't see the
water it's swimming in. And so the narrative that they will tell is in some important sense incommensurable with the narratives that others will tell. So I want us to try and understand the sources of these irreconcilable
conflicting narratives that I think have become in many ways weaponized since 2016. And I think there's no
way to do this except by going back into American history and seeing how contentious and tangled these perceptions of who has
had what advantage and when. And what is the appropriate
thing to do about it. Let's reflect on some
landmarks in the battles over race in America. And particularly the battles
over separation of the races and integration of the
races that have been here literally since the country's founding. I'm not gonna go back all
the way to the founding, but let's go back to before the Civil War. In 1857, in the Dred Scott case. This was a fugitive slave had
escaped to a non-slave state. The question was whether they could sue in order to prevent themselves
from being returned. And the court held, among other things, this person had no standing to sue, because black Americans were not citizens. And so this was essentially
an affirmation of the idea that there has to be a
fundamental separation of blacks and whites, because
blacks are not truly citizens. And this, Dred Scott
was one many decisions, and this was in the court, but of course, things that were done in
the federal government that eventually led to the
Civil War debates about extending slavery to the
territories and so on. But then we get the Civil
War Amendments in 1865, 1868 and 1870, which at least on their face, are pressing for more racial inclusion. Undoing if you like,
the Dred Scott decision. It outlawed slavery, they
created equal protection, forbid it being denied
on the basis of race, and the 15th Amendment
granted voting rights. It said that voting rights
could not be withheld on the basis of race, or
previous condition of servitude. So there you see an attempt
to get more inclusive polity. That then runs into the reality
that citizens in the South, white citizens in the South had many, had not accepted the outcome
of the Civil War as legitimate. And huge backlash and attempts to undo the effect of the Civil War amendments. I talked in an earlier
lecture that the Supreme Court was to some extent
complicit in that by reading the amendments very narrowly. So as to limit their effect. And so we had the rise of Jim
Crow, first hard to partite, and then soft to partite. 1896, the court upheld the idea
of separation of the races, again in the educational
context, and separate but equal was a legitimate way to
organize K through 12 education. And we see this pull back from the idea of an integrated polity. 1935, the Social Security Act is passed. Another wonderful book by Ira Katznelson called "Fear Itself,"
deals with the passage of the New Deal. And in particular, the reality
that the only way in which Roosevelt could get the
New Deal through congress, which was controlled by, the big committees were
controlled by Democrats from the South who were
strongly opposed to all forms of racial integration. Was to make essentially
exceptions that would get them to support it. And in particular the Social Security Act excluded domestic and
agricultural workers, most of whom were African American. And so, that was if you
like, the quid for the quo. We're talking about
quid pro quo these days. That was the quid for the quo, to get enough Southern support to pass the Social Security Act. Again a deprivation of
a racial group and the continuing if you like, soft
de partite in that case, because an proxy rather than race was used to achieve the exclusion. Then we get the Warren Cord, and we get Brown versus Board
of Education in 1954 and 1955. Overturning Plesy and saying no separation is not acceptable, there's
no possibility of having equal education that is
based on racial separation. That it's again bound to
be a form of discrimination and perceived as such,
and experienced as such by black children. And so the court ordered
integration of the schools, which turned out to be much
more difficult to achieve for reasons that we have
talked about earlier, than people might have anticipated. And so again you see this tussle over what is the ideal? You know the public ideal
of America is this notion of a melting pot, that is
a nation of immigrants, people come from all places, and Italians, and Irish and others have
all eventually become part of the melting pot. But, with African Americans it seems to be fundamentally different, because of this battle over inclusion. And of course we shouldn't
think that this is only a battle among white voters. A lot of the conversation about
inclusion versus exclusion tends to treat African
Americans as incapable of using agency of their
own on these matters. Which of course is not the case. If you look at the history
of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King was very
much for holding up America to its own ideology. And saying you're not
living up to the ideals which you profess. This is what Michael Walzer
calls eminent criticism in his little book, "Interpretation
and Social Criticism." You take the melting pot
ideal and the immigrant story and you say it's being
violated with respect to African Americans,
you're being hypocritical. We need to have the kind of inclusion the
American dream should be equally available to all. But not everybody in the African
American community agreed. And a rift opened up, the young... A young activist by the name of Malcolm X took a very different view of the matter. So let's listen to Malcolm
X for a minute or two. - What is your attitude on the relations between the black and white races, what do you seek to accomplish? - The best way to solve the problem that black people are involved in this country, is to let us separate from whites and solve our own problems. Do for ourselves that which
whites do for themselves. Stop baiting the white man
and stand on our own feet and solve our own problems. - Is it far to say as a
generality and as a succinct way to put it that you believe
in segregation of the races? - Segregation is that which is forced upon inferiors by superiors. Separation is done
voluntary by two equals. You never refer to the oriental community in which orientals live exclusively as a segregated community. Because they live there voluntarily. Everything there is controlled by them. The economy, the politics,
the civic organizations, but the negro community is referred to a segregated community. Because Negros are forced
to live in that community contrary to their will. And they don't control the
businesses of their community. They don't control the
politics of their community, nor their social life. We do believe in separation,
standing on our own feet, among our own kind, and
solving our own problems. And that's the only way
you'll get a solution to the vital race problem in this country. Our people should unite among ourselves and try to solve our own problems, instead of trying to force
ourselves upon whites and blame them for our plight. - Could we press for a very
simple answer to one question? Do you hate all white people? - I don't think it's a fair question. White man doesn't even
come into my attitude. Mr. Mohammad teaches us
to love our own kind, and let the white man
take care of himself. For a white man today, sir, after kidnapping millions
of black people from Africa, stripping them of all
human characteristics, and relegating them to
the role of chattel, or cattle, or animals,
commodity, merchandise that can be bought and sold at will. And then 100 years since the
Emancipation Proclamation, using every type of deceptive method to further us into slavery,
called second class citizenship. I think that it would
take a whole lot of nerve for white people today to
ask Negros do they hate all of the injustices that
black people are crying out against in this country,
are being inflicted upon them by whites. It is the whites who
are depriving our people of civil rights. It is whites who are depriving
our people of implementing what the Supreme Court decision
said should be implemented. Wherever black people
turn, they are facing the hostility of whites. Martin Luther King teaches
Negros to love all white people no matter what they do to you. And the same whites whom
he teaches Negros to love, sic dogs on him, sic
dogs on their children, dogs on their women, and
dogs on their babies. So, I think it's very
hypocritical on the part of whites to accuse Mr. Mohammad of a hate teacher, because he says separation. And then sic dogs on Martin Luther King who is teaching integration. It means that no matter
what the Negro does he is not going to get along with whites. So I think that Mr.
Mohammad's whole philosophy is more intelligent than Mr. King's. - So that was this, he
was a representative of the black nationalist idea that trying to get integration into the dominant culture was a fool's errand. It hadn't worked in 100 years, and it wasn't gonna work any time soon. And so, there should be
this separatist agenda that he had gotten behind. It's important to say that he
subsequently changed his mind. He had a falling out with Elijah Mohammad who he talks about there. And he spent some time
traveling in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere and saw
that there were Muslims who of many different colors,
who actually did get along and work together. In the following year
he actually separated from the nation of Islam,
and began to support the civil rights agenda, although he remained a black nationalist. His falling out with the
nation of Islam was so grave that they actually, they assassinated him, as I'm sure some of you know. The following year he was murdered. But interestingly, there's
a curious kind of historical convergence because, Malcolm X became more
in favor of integration and the civil rights agenda. Whereas actually Martin Luther King, in the last years of his life would become less sanguine about the
possibilities of integration. And by the time he was
assassinated four years later, he said why he had not given up hope, he was no longer optimistic having seen how little had been achieved by that time. So, but there you have it. You have this rift up in the
African American community over integration and separation. Which would subsequently
become transformed into debates about multiculturalism versus the integration American dream. Should we try and get
everybody to approximate to some national norm? Or, should we respect the differences among different groups? And this would become a
central motif in battles about conflicting
narratives going forward. So, if we then think about
the two great achievements of the 1960s from the
point of view of race. And perhaps the two greatest achievements including the decades since then, were the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And these were seen as
great achievements for the integrationist view,
that people were no longer gonna be denied just the formal
incidents of citizenship, but the substantive
incidence of citizenship. And, that this was gonna be
the path going forward. It should be said the reason
there were two separate pieces of legislation was that in 1964. The Johnson Administration
was not in favor of voting rights legislation, because they thought it would
be potentially too explosive. And battles over voting
rights had also beset only during the New Deal. The Roosevelt Administration
in their battles with Southerners who controlled congress. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act was when the first big
wave of racial violence exploded in the US. There wasn't racial
violence before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, it came later. And that that was what eventually prompted the recognition that it
was gonna be essential to have voting rights legislation. So that's why we had two
pieces of legislation. Another important landmark I
think I the evolving narratives was the publication of
what came to be known as the Moynihan Report,
named for Patrick Moynihan, a famous senator who brought a very different
set of assumptions and tools to thinking about racial
disparities in the United States. The Moynihan Report was
called The Negro Family, the Case for National Action. And it was, I think, an
early indication of how the views of white elites,
who think of themselves as progressive harbingers of change, can be perceived very
differently by the people about whom they are talking. And what concerned Moynihan
was the high levels of out of wedlock births
in the black community. So, you can see on the
slide the Moynihan Report is released in 1965. And at that time, African Americans had about 28% of children were born to
mothers who were not married. And the numbers were, and the
percentages were much lower among Hispanics, and whites
and all other groups. So, this produced another narrative that would become hugely contentious about the social pathologies of the
black underclass, so called. And that it was really the
disintegration of the family that was at the roots of the difficulties being experienced in the black community. Again, this was widely trumpeted by some as an important thing that
needed to be dealt with. But also widely vilified
by others as again denying the agency of African
Americans and using language and terminology of medical,
medicalized terminology of pathologies and so on. And interestingly of course, the numbers were hotly disputed at the time. And if you look at how
they've evolved subsequently, you can see that the number of children born out of wedlock in white families today is just as high as the number of children
born out of wedlock in 1965 when Moynihan was writing. And moreover, and I
think this is the reason we get an irreconcilable
narratives about this, if you ask the question how many, you know where are the out
of wedlock children born? Of course, because the white
community is much larger than the African American community, 2/3 of out of wedlock
children then and now are actually born to white parents. And so, you can find if you like, if you want to find facts to
support a different narrative there are plenty of conflicting
stories that can be told. You know another piece
of this is that people would point out that when upper middle class
white people decide not to get married, it's seen
as a choice of lifestyle. But when a poor black person does it, it's seen as a social pathology. And so again, you find
that these conflicting moral narratives are irreconcilable. People glum onto different facts, and use them as the
decisive ones to illustrate what it is that they are talking about. So, I think that the Moynihan Report foregrounded a lot of these
debates about African Americans in ways that made people
increasingly speak past one another. Nixon's Southern strategy
in 1968, we've talked about this in an earlier lecture. This is the backlash against
the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act. He takes advantage of that by recognizing that there's a second dimension, when we talked about the Downsian Models. That there's a second
dimension in that resistance to racial integration matters
more to many Southern whites than economic benefits
from the welfare state. And so it's possible to, if you like, divide Southern whites
by appealing to race. And that was Nixon's Southern strategy. And again I think brought racial divisions back into the foreground
of American politics. And then the next really important step, I think comes in 1971. And so this is the McGovern-Fraser report on the structure of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party had
been in a major crisis in the late 1960s. Not only because of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, who had both been strong
supporters of civil rights, but the 1968 election had been explosive for the Democratic Party. But what had happened was not withstanding Lyndon Johnson's massive victory in 1964. A huge landslide he was
fortunate to be running against Barry Goldwater at that time. Goldwater was sufficiently
far from the mainstream of American politics, that
Johnson could prevail. And he had used those majorities to enact the civil rights legislation
that I've already talked about. But he also, of course,
massively escalated the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. And by the time 1968 rolled around, it was clear that Johnson
couldn't run for reelection. He wasn't going to win. But this was at a time
when parties would govern much more top down. I will talk more about that on Thursday. And there was a sense that the anti-war sentiment
in the Democratic Party had to be contained. But the trouble was once
Johnson was not running, all of the candidates who were running were anti-war candidates. So, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was sort of parachuted into the race. He didn't run in any primaries, he was named as the candidate. And this produced an explosion at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago. And there was violence in the streets. And there was a strong sense of crisis in the Democratic Party. And this produced a movement for reform. No more smoke filled rooms. We are going to democratize
the Democratic Party. And so, a political scientist, a very distinguished political scientist by the name of Austin Ranney
chaired this commission with some others that became known as the Mcgovern-Fraser Commission. And it recommended, among other things, much greater use of primaries. And I'll talk more about that on Thursday. But also democratization
of the power structures of the Democratic Party. And in particular, the use of quotas for various minority for women, and various minority
groups in the decisions about platform committees,
the governance of the party, the selection of delegates. Much more what we've since come to call descriptive representation. Much, a kind of that
different groups must all be represented in the governance
of the Democratic Party. And that indeed is what transpired. And this is part and
parcel of the acceleration and attention to racial
and ethnic characteristics in thinking about the
distribution of offices and other benefits. That same decade, in 1978,
the Supreme Court finally took up the question of affirmative action in this Bakke decision in
University of California Davis Medical School. Which had set aside some
positions for minority candidates. And Bakke was somebody
who scored less well, I'm sorry, scored better on the test than the minority candidates who were admitted in the set aside places and he sued. And he prevailed. But, what was interesting
in the decision was that the court said you can't
have quotas for minorities, but you can take race into account. And this then became the moment at which the hugely fought subsequent
history of battles about affirmative action got started. And particularly with
words like diversity. We're now going through this
in all the elite universities of the government looking
at whether diversity's being used as a smoke screen
for ethnic and racial quotas. You can have diversity, you
can take race into account, among other characteristics,
but you can't have quotas. And so, this whole debate
about affirmative action has become another one of these conflicting moral narratives. In 1984, in the Democratic race, we're now in the middle of
the Reagan Administration and the Democrats are running, basically. Walter Mondale is gonna
likely be the candidate. And Jesse Jackson, a young civil
rights leader at that time, has mounted a campaign against
him, did surprisingly well in a number of primaries. But in the end had to support the ticket. And he makes a speech at the
Democratic National Convention in 1984, where he tries to put together these very disparate ideas of melting pot versus multiculturalism. And he uses the metaphor
of a rainbow coalition. So he's trying to square
the circle, if you like. And this is how he goes about it. - Our flag is red, white and blue. But our nation is rainbow,
red, yellow, brown, black and white, we're all precious in God's sight!
(crowds cheering) (crowds yelling, applauding and cheering) America's not like a blanket,
one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same
texture, the same size. America's more like a quilt, many patches, many pieces,
many colors, many sizes. All woven and held together
by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the
black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native
American, the small farmer, the business person,
the environmentalists, the peace activists, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled, make up the American quilt. (crowd cheering and applauding) Even in our fractured state, all of us count and fit somewhere. We have proven that we can
survive without each other. But we have not proven that
we can win and make progress without each other, we must come together. (crowd cheers) - So there you have the
idea of a rainbow coalition. And it's interesting that
when you actually go back and find the speech, it's
very clear that he intends everyone to be included. But again, this is an
area where I think you get divergent narratives, because the... In the commentary on the
history of identity politics, and racial identity politics in the US, this is interpreted as the moment at which the Democratic Party
starts to think of itself as a patchwork of minorities. We talked about the
patchwork metaphor there. But a patchwork of minorities, a strong deference to multiculturalism. All the different minorities
should form an alliance to change the status quo. Whereas in the actual
speech he's very clear that he's also referring to whites. But that's not how it
came to be interpreted in the dominant lexicon. And indeed you can hear people say, "Well the thing about a rainbow, "it contains every color except white." And so the notion that this
patchwork of minorities, if that becomes the dominant ethos of the Democratic Party,
there's gonna be no place in it for the sort of people
that Arlie Hochschild is talking about when she's
talking about cutting in. There we have the idea
of the rainbow coalition. And it's important to
say that while the idea of descriptive representation in politics starts in the Democratic Party with the Mcgovern-Fraser reforms. It also migrates into the
political system more broadly with the advent of majority
minority districts. And the fight over majority
minority districts. This was the idea that
was developed in order to try and get African
Americans elected to congress. Particularly from the South,
where it seemed almost impossible to do that. And this is partly because
of the way districting is done in the United States. It's done by whoever,
at least at this time, it's now a more complicated story, but at this time the
districts were always drawn by whoever controlled
the state legislature after the decennial census. So you'd have a new census and then, it's still the case in 2/3 of the states, that some states now have
independent commissions to do it. But basically, most states
still have this system. And what was done was
the districts were drawn, so as to dilute African
American representation. And when the Voting Rights
Act was reauthorized in 1982, stronger requirements were put in that essentially said that the section two of the Voting Rights Act required
that drawing of districts in certain circumstances
that would lead to the possibility of
electing African Americans. And it was, you might
think somewhat surprising that legislation reauthorized
in 1982 would do this. Because this is during
the Reagan Administration which one would not have
thought would be particularly friendly to this idea. But although the White
House was not in favor of this legislation. In fact, a number of
Republicans on the hill, and Republican strategists
were in favor of it. Because they saw it as a
possibility of actually reducing Democratic strength in the South. So the thought would
be, well if you create a majority minority
district you might increase the number of African
Americans in congress at the expense of reducing the number of Democrats in congress. And so some people have spoken
about an unholy alliance between the congressional black caucus and congressional Republicans. And at some points even the Justice Department
to support this idea, or at least not to
oppose it very strongly, so as to, as I said, people
with very different motives, the congressional black caucus
wanted to increase its size. But Republicans who supported this idea saw it as a way of strengthening
themselves in the house. In any case in 1986 the Supreme
Court took up this matter and said that it's okay to have
majority minority districts, provided the minority group
is large and compact enough to constitute a single district. And provided the group
is politically cohesive and can demonstrate that. Provided the minority group
can show that it votes sufficiently as a group to defeat the minority group's preferred candidate. So the idea was if you can show
that you're voting together as a group, and you conceive
yourself as a group, they can draw districts
to increase minorities. And so as of 2015 I believe
there were 122 majority minority districts in the United States, which is roughly a 1/4 of
the districts in the house. So again, you have appeal to the idea of
separation in drawing districts, creating districts which will send a minority candidate to congress. Which they indeed did. The number of minority
candidates in congress increased as a result of this. And it should be said
that in state legislatures the same thing was done. Again, this was as a
response to previous forms of districting, that had excluded African
Americans from the possibility of electing African Americans to office. 2009 Reece versus Destefano, the reason I bring this
case up is I think again, it really speaks to the conflicting, irreconcilably conflicting
narratives that have beset these debates about
inclusion and exclusion. So this was a Connecticut case, Mayor John Destefano, mayor of New Haven. This was a firefighter's union case. And what had happened was the city of New Haven had given an exam for promotion to officer. No African Americans had
done well enough on the exam to be promoted, so the
city fairing litigation from African Americans
about a discriminatory test. At least a test that had
a discriminatory impact, disregarded the results of
the test, and didn't use it. This then produced a lawsuit. There was one Hispanic, and 19 white plaintiffs. And the court upheld their objection. The decision to get rid of the test was held to violate the rights
of Reece and his colleagues. So the reason I bring
this up in this context is not about the result, but rather it really
underlines one of the realities about affirmative action. Which is that we tend to
think about affirmative action very differently from the
way many people experience it on the ground. This was summed up in
1995 in a book by a man called Michael Lynn, "The
Next American Nation, "The New Nationalism and the
Fourth American Revolution." He had a discussion of what
he called a white over class. Again, this is the kind of liberal elites that would turn out to be
objects of rage and ire from those voters that Arlie Hochschild was gonna be interviewing later. Lynn made the observation he
said, "The white over class," and he was thinking here of sort of people we might today characterize
as limousine liberals can, live right and think left. And so the thought here
was that affirmative action has no real effect on the kind of people who live in Scarsdale. They can get advantages for
their sons and daughters. We're seeing one of the
scandals about how they do it in college admissions
playing out right now. Lynn was saying this in
1995, very interesting book. But the real front line,
the real battles that effect affirmative action are exactly
in places like promotions in the police department
and the fire department. And that's where people on the short end
of affirmative action say, "I never had slaves, I never did anything "to discriminate against
African Americans. "Why am I not getting that promotion?" So this is, if you like, Lynn in 1995 already identifying the beginning of this cutting in narrative. That feeds the sense of
grievance that drives the anger and resentment that Hochschild and Cramer have documented. And, just to bring us right up to date, if you look at the Democratic primaries, you know among the things
which they are talking about and fighting about are
questions about reparations. Again, reparations is an idea which produces
very divergent narratives. Some people see them as
absolutely morally compelling. Others see them including African American left wing intellectuals
such as Adolf Reed, Jr., sees debates about reparations
as hugely destructive of the possibility of
building the sort of alliances that could produce progressive change. Again, you're back in
this world of irreducibly conflicting narratives that
are important to people in understanding themselves
and their identities. And that motivate them in politics, even to the point where
perhaps they'll take positions that are self defeating from
a materialist point of view, or from an intraspace point of view. And that really is I think
the takeaway when we delve into this history and we
see the ways in which race has played out in American politics, it constantly feeds these
mutually incompatible narratives. And this is an important thing to know, because it's one of the ways
in which modernization theory got politics very badly wrong. To this point in this
course I've talked about modernization theory and democracy. That there were these
predictions that countries would become more democratic
as they developed economically. But there was another important prediction of modernization theory,
which in some ways underlay the prediction about democracy. And that was the prediction
that identity politics would over time be displaced
by interest based politics. That things like religion and
race, and so on, would atrophy as sources as political mobilization. This is something about
which they couldn't have been more wrong. It's partly the prediction
that democracy would arise is that when you think
about divisible goods, which is important for
the divided dollar game, and for democracy to work, that is things like money and income. Once you start talking
about identity politics, it's not about divisible goods, it's about a very
different kind of politics. It's about recognition, it's about status. It's about telling moral
narratives that either validate you or humiliate you. And so we have reached
a world in which we have these conflicting narratives
that are not easily reconciled, even when they're about the same topic, such as affirmative action, or majority minority districts, or, racial set asides of other sorts. You get these mutually
incompatible narratives. And what happened after 2016 is that one of these became
weaponized, essentially. Trump found a way to weaponize the narrative of cutting in,
that Hochschild had uncovered. And that is the story of
the socioeconomic sources of populism as it's played out. And we'll turn to the political
sources of it on Thursday. (bright digital bell tones music)
