On Oct 7, 2009, at 12:00 PM, John Gulick wrote:
> I do find
> it a bit odd that you are so zealous about going to the mat to
> defend a critique of anti-racism that (as Shag has astutely
> pointed out) is fundamentally that of a cranky left-liberal rather
> than one of a radical Marxist...
What I'm defending is Michaels' argument that "anti-racism" is entirely compatible with neoliberalism, and is even used to legitimize it. That's not to say there's no such thing as racism, or sexism, or homophobia - but that much of the American elite proudly thinks of itself as beyond it.
I don't see how a "liberal" would write a sentence like this (from his piece in the July/August NLR): "Because it is exploitation, not discrimination, that is the primary producer of inequality today."
Nor do I see why any radical, Marxist or otherwise, would object to this: "In actually existing neoliberalism, blacks and women are still disproportionately represented both in the bottom quintile—too many— and in the top quintile—too few—of American incomes. In the neoliberal utopia that the Obama campaign embodies, blacks would be 13.2 per cent of the (numerous) poor and 13.2 per cent of the (far fewer) rich; women would be 50.3 per cent of both. For neoliberals, what makes this a utopia is that discrimination would play no role in administering the inequality; what makes the utopia neoliberal is that the inequality would remain intact."
Or this: "[T]he ability of the Obama campaign to make us feel pretty good about ourselves while at the same time leaving our wealth untouched, is striking—as emblematized in his tax proposals which are designed to ask more of the ‘well-off’, but not of ‘the middle class’. Who are the well-off? ‘I generally define well-off’, says Obama’s website, ‘as people who are making $250,000 a year or more’. Which means that people making, say, $225,000 (who are in the 97th percentile of American incomes) are middle class; and that they deserve to be taxed in the same way as those in the 50th percentile, making $49,000. The headline of the website on which this appears is ‘I’m Asking You to Believe’. But asking the 40 per cent of Americans who live on under $42,000 to believe that they belong to the same middle class as the approximately 15 per cent who make $100,000– $250,000 may be asking too much. It is, however, what the Democratic Party has been asking them to believe for the last twenty years."
Or this: "The point, then, is that the nomination of Obama is great news for American liberals, who love equality when it comes to race and gender, but are not so keen when it comes to money.... The Obama candidacy is great news, in other words, for a liberalism that is every bit as elitist as its conservative critics say—although not, of course, quite as elitist as the conservative critics themselves."
These liberals, I think, are precisely those whom Ruy Teixeira points to as the new Dem base: educated professionals in the suburbs and gentrified urban neighborhoods who find Republicans icky but don't particularly like unions or the public sector either.
Doug