> Underclass ideology -- where left and right come
together to embed a common sense around victim-blaming
and punitive moralism, racialized of course but at a
respectable remove from the familiar phenotypically
based racial taxonomy -- will most likely be the
vehicle for effecting the purge. Obama's success will
embody how far we have come in realizing racial
democracy, and the inequality that remains is most
immediately a function of cultural -- i.e.,
attitudinal, and behavioral -- and moral deficits that
undercut acquisition of "human (and/or "social," these
interchangeable mystifications shift according to
rhetorical need) capital," a message his incessant
castigation of black behavior legitimizes. In this
context, the "activism" appropriate for attacking
inequality: 1) rationalizes privatization and
demonization of the public sector through accepting
the premise that government is inefficient and stifles
"creativity;" 2) values individual voluntarism and
"entrepreneurship" over collective action (e.g., four
of the five winners of the Nation's "Brave Young
Activist" award started their own designer NGOs and/or
websites; the fifth carries a bullhorn around and
organizes solidarity demos); 3) provides enrichment
experiences, useful extracurrics, and/or career paths
for precocious Swarthmore and Brown students and grads
(the Wendy Kopp/Samantha Power model trajectory), and
4) reduces the scope of direct action politics to the
"all tactics, no strategy," fundamentally Alinskyite,
ACORN-style politics that Doug Henwood and Liza
Featherstone have described as "activistism" and whose
potential for reactionary opportunism Andy Stern of
SEIU has amply demonstrated. Obama goes a step
further in deviating from Alinskyism to the right, by
rejecting its "confrontationalism," which severs its
rhetoric of "empowerment" from political action and
contestation entirely and merges the notion into the
pop-psychological, big box Protestant, Oprah Winfrey,
Reaganite discourse of self-improvement/personal
responsibility.
> All of the above salves the consciences of our
professional-managerial class peers and coworkers who
want to think of themselves as more tolerant and
enlightened than their Republican relatives and
neighbors, even as they insulate themselves and their
families as much as possible from undesired contact
with the dangerous classes and define the latter in
quotidian practice through precisely the same
racialized and victim-blaming stereotypes as the
conservatives to whom they imagine themselves
superior. This hypocrisy, of course, is understood
within the stratum as unavoidable accommodation to
social realities, and likely to be acknowledged as an
unfortunate and lamentable necessity. Yet those
lamenting at the same time reject out of hand as
impractical any politics that would challenge the
conditions that reproduce the inequalities underlying
those putative realities. Obama, in the many ways that
Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley and others have
catalogued here, is an ideal avatar for this stratum.
He has condensed, in what political dilettantes of all
stripes rush to call a "movement," the reactionary
quintessence that Walter Benn Michaels in The Trouble
With Diversity identifies in a politics of identity or
multiculturalism that substitutes difference for
inequality as the crucial metric of political
criticism.
[clip]
Walter Benn Michaels on the same:
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=11864
Shane