(Apologies all around for the terseness and sloppiness of my posts... it is well past 1:00am here in Korea but I wanted to strike while the iron is still hot)
DH wrote:
>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.
JG writes:
I concur with you on all scores: this is indeed the base of the new Dems, I do indeed find their variety of National Public Radio "neo-liberal anti-racism" to be odious, and this indeed is the crowd whose sensibilities Michaels is probably attempting to tweak. That being said...
I find Michaels' thought experiment -- "neo-liberal anti-racists would celebrate a world in which economic disadvantages would be equally distributed by race and gender" -- to be methodologically suspect at best and politically disingenuous at worst. Methodologically suspect because (echoing Alan Rudy and Shag) Michaels seems to believe one can cleanly separate structures/practices of class exploitation and racial oppression, isolating one versus the other in positivistic fashion... that's why I referred to Michaels as a "left-liberal," one who bases his claims on the explanatory power of regression tables. Politically disingenuous because obviously anyone with radical egalitarian leanings would find equal opportunity capitalism to be objectionable -- it's a trope Michaels uses to mask the fact that he hasn't done his homework (as Shag points out) on the complex interrelations between class exploitation and racial oppression... as exposed by his botched handling of the concept of "social construction" in the interview you did with him.
But then again, I'm a sociologist who has avoided sophisticated race/class/gender theorizing because I find the whole exercise to be tedious at best and explosive at worst. Accordingly I probably haven't explained myself well here.
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