Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy

Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of DemocracyAuthor(s): Nikhil Pal SinghSource: American Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Sep., 1998), pp. 471-522Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30042149 .

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Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy

NIKHIL PAL SINGH New York University

IN THIS ESSAY I WILL BEGIN TO SKETCH A PROVISIONAL HISTORY FOR

the culture wars in the United States, in order to understand how the problematic we engage today in the name of multiculturalism emerges and gains a functioning intellectual value and role. In general, the current discussion that counterposes multiculturalism and universalism as principal, opposed terms in the culture wars, simplifies a much more unruly set of issues, involving a series of determinations and mediations of both a local and global kind. As a corollary, this discussion is often conducted in a parochial spirit, as if the controversy around multiculturalism is an internal, and wholly recent, U.S. affair. In this oft repeated story, multiculturalism is understood as both a settling of accounts from the 1960s and a continuation of politics by other means within the state-educational apparatuses and the culture industries. The fulcrum of this discussion turns upon a narrow debate about whether or not it is legitimate to pursue knowledge-projects based upon the goal of "preserving separate minority group cultures" within the United States.'

The larger stake in this debate is the proper historical interpretation of American pluralism. In this, a more or less cold war understanding of pluralism as the privileged theory for achieving a managed consensus within a diverse, democratic polity, is pitted against post-1960s senses of pluralism as a referent for the harshest, most enduring and intrac- table divisions within American life, usually those associated with racial and/or cultural difference. Yet, the very instability of the meaning

Nikhil Pal Singh is the director of graduate studies in the American studies program at New York University and the author of Color and Democracy in the American Century (forthcoming).

American Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 3 (September 1998) © 1998 American Studies Association

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472 AMERICAN QUARTERLY

of a term like pluralism (or multiculturalism) is emblematic of what is most confusing about the culture wars: the way we understand the grounds of the discussion determines much of what we end up speaking for, or against. Is multiculturalism a minority plot to "disunite America"? Is it a corporate project to work through and profit from "diversity"? Is it a hopeful, even global, vision of cultural justice? Is it a defensive retreat into increasingly narrow, local forms of cultural identity? These are all real possibilities. Thus, taking seriously today's frequent injunc- tion that we need to get "beyond multiculturalism," I also want to redefine some of the terms and grounds of the discussion.2 I suggest that going beyond multiculturalism does not mean once again crossing the teleological threshold in which U.S. intranational differences and divisions are understood as the associated commonalities of some great national abstraction (that is, the state, the founding documents, the ideals of the revolution, and so forth). Instead, if we are even to consider going beyond multiculturalism, we must first assess in a more thoroughgoing manner just what it has actually meant in recent history (and what it might mean in the future) to rely upon the U.S. nation-state as a stable container of social antagonisms, and as the necessary horizon of our hopes for justice.3

In order to accomplish this task, it will not be helpful to imagine a debate in which universalism is presumed to be a singular, embattled term, any more than to try and adjudicate internal, U.S. squabbles over the status of group differences. Rather, in the essay that follows I try to account for some specific historical conditions and intellectual traditions and dispositions that have shaped the culture wars in their dominant, U.S. form since World War II. I thus propose the following question as a more productive starting point for thinking about multiculturalism and universalism: How are socially consequential forms of intranational and supranational identity constituted in relation to the normative political structures and presumptive universals of Euroamerican modernity: the nation-state, democratic citizenship, and the public sphere? By framing the question in this manner, and by examining several paradigmatic-and socially hegemonic-ways in which it has been answered in the United States since World War II, I hope to demonstrate the impossibility of coming up with properly "multiculturalist" and properly "universalist" prescriptions in the current conjuncture. At the same time, I elucidate some of the alternatives that may have been repressed in the ruling social and intellectual



RECODING EMPIRE 473

settlements that have in effect "answered" this question during the past fifty years. In doing so, finally, I demonstrate that the culture wars and the cold war bear more than nominal similarity. Both have been defined around a set of general intellectual processes, including 1) anxiety- ridden efforts to establish the legitimacy of the "liberal" state in the face of presumed threats from an irresponsible, unAmerican left, and a potentially, xenophobic right; 2) crisis-driven processes of normalizing (or universalizing) state procedures governing intranational differences, specifically with respect to race and citizenship structures; and 3) the deepening imbrication and increasing confusion of identities and differences within and beyond U.S. national borders, requiring persistent, and frequently violent adjudication of what it means to be responsible for, or to in fact be, the world.

I. Color and Democracy in "the American Century"

As long as America and Europe could think of Western civilization as being, somehow, identical with universal history, the racial division of the world did not present an acute problem.

-Carey McWilliams, Brothers Under the Skin (1943)

Critics of multiculturalism-from the left and right-have by and large joined together in lamenting its fragmenting and diversionary aspects: fragmenting with respect to projects that are robustly 'national' in scope, and diversionary in relation to the quest for 'true' knowledge about the social world and its ills. Yet, much of this criticism has missed the most salient issue, namely that the sense of urgency that now surrounds multicultural questions about the meaning and status of intranational differences and transnational solidarities, developed in the United States in a very particular time and place, and in a specific relationship to the question of world order. This is not to deny that a full account of U.S. multiculturalism includes the central conflicts attendant upon national-social formation: the conquest of aboriginal peoples, the institution of racial slavery, and the phenomenon of multiple and diverse, international, labor migrations. Yet, I want to suggest that what now goes under the rubric of multiculturalism possesses a more definitive relationship to, and is in fact an outgrowth of, the interpre- tive, social struggles attendant upon the redefinition of "the American realm of action in the world" since World War II.4




In particular, the global struggle against fascism, as Cedric Robinson notes, "plunged the country into a dramatic contest between conflicting constructions of civilization and the ordering mechanism of race."5 One of the most significant and least remarked upon features of the early 1940s was that it gave rise to a profound reconceptualization of the terms of racialized citizenship within the United States. This period was marked by the simultaneous emergence of state-driven efforts to engineer a "Second Reconstruction" within the United States, and by the massive mobilization of anti-racist initiatives within the institutions of northern civil society and the public sphere: voluntary organizations, trade unions, journalism, cultural and literary production. As the Pittsburgh Courier's "Double V Campaign" ("a victory against the Nazis abroad, and a victory against racism at home") starkly confirmed, the moral status of American nationhood and the status of black nationality within America was now inextricably intertwined. The profound irresolution regarding the meaning and substance of universal citizenship, posed again and again throughout U.S. history, could no longer be sustained, nor upheld. What followed was the beginning of a decade of legislation and reform that would desegregate the military, liberalize naturalization law, prohibit the white primary, restrictive covenants and segregation in interstate travel, integrate Major League baseball, and eventually culminate in the historic public school desegregation decision, Brown vs. Board of Education-the event that is more generally taken as the official beginning of the modern civil rights era.6

The crucial linkages between the local, national, and global instances of the racial revolution of the 1940s have been largely erased within a historiography that has tended to elevate first the cold war, and then the civil rights movement as the prime movers of the unfolding, national spirit during this era.7 With notable exceptions, cold war historiography in its state-centered preoccupation with great power rivalry, geopolitical conflict, communism, containment, and counter-insurgency, divides the world into international and domestic spheres in which questions of race and cultural difference are at best local and residual concerns.8 At the same time, the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement represents racial division not only as a domestic problem-but as a "Southern Question"-obscuring the extent to which America's more ambitiously hegemonic view of national power and international mission during this period had already raised necessary and difficult



RECODING EMPIRE 475

questions about the cultural and institutional manifestations of racism within the world-system: fascism and colonialism.9 These tendencies converge in prominent recent accounts of the 1960s, in which the combination of anti-war protest and anti-racist militancy heralds the fatal disintegration of a broad, liberal-reform coalition invested in a redemptive understanding of the nation-state as a "beloved community." In this account, the decisive corruption of redemptive nationalism by the recoding of civilizing imperialism as modernization-"bombing Vietnam back to the Stone Age," as Rostow put it-recedes eerily into the background.'0

In general, it has been difficult to develop and sustain an account of post-World War II national history that has not been consumed by the imperative to secure and justify the nation-state. As a consequence, the constitutive relationship between intranational division and supranational ambition and the competing universalisms in which this relationship has been articulated has been fundamentally obscured." Specifi- cally, this historiography has failed to recognize the degree to which American thinking about world-order and world-power since World War II has consistently foregrounded what Common Ground editor Louis Adamic called the "cultural-racial situation" at home.12 Among the stock, programmatic ideas embraced by the loose-knit group of intellectuals associated with wartime organizations such as the Com- mon Council for American Unity and its journal Common Ground was the notion that achieving "common-ground" within America meant celebrating the United States as "a nation of nations." In what would become a standard conception during this period, these writers were among the first to tie the successful realization of a kind of multiculturalism within the United States to the just cause of America's world-ordering ambitions. Carey McWilliams, one of the most astute analysts of wartime nationalism and regular Common Ground contribu- tor, formulated the matter in the following way:

It is pre-eminently our assignment to demonstrate to the world that peoples of diverse racial and national origins, of different backgrounds, and many cultures, can live and work together in a modem democracy. As a nation of nations we alone are in a position to exercise real political leadership. At the same time, however, the divisive forces that have brought disaster to the world also threaten our national unity. Our unique position constitutes both our strength and our weakness. If we fail in the world, we fail at home; if we fail at home, we are not likely to succeed in the world.'3




Contemporary historians of American pluralism have tended to read this sort of statement as an example of the right variety of pluralism- a pluralism oriented toward nationalism, oriented toward universalism-precisely what has been sacrificed at the altar of multiculturalism. According to this view, World War II was a moment when an American universalism flourished, when it was actually good to be an American nationalist, when pluralism was not so divisive, and when difference did not mean apartness, let alone separatism. Contrasting the lamen- table state of contemporary multiculturalism with the pluralism of the early 1940s, Philip Gleason summarizes this view, writing that during World War II "cultural pluralism and cultural democracy became part of the standard terminology of a broad movement to improve inter- group relations, but its goals were social harmony and national unity, not heightened consciousness of the differences among cultural groups in the population."'4

To describe this argument as simply an example of the good pluralism of American nationalism, however, would be to overlook McWilliams's stern warning that the war "forced hard upon us the necessity of taking stock of our American tradition" (6). In his view, this required first and foremost a serious grappling with "the long range minority problems," or the singular problem of "colored minorities." "One of our basic weaknesses in dealing with colored minorities," McWilliams argued, "has been our failure to recognize the basic similarities they represent" (316). In stark contrast to contemporary pluralist arguments that conflate "race" and "ethnicity," in his most important work of the period, Brothers Under the Skin, McWilliams outlined how forms of racial exclusion were deeply woven into the fabric of modern American law and society as the United States entered the 1940s.'5 In what remains an unsurpassed account, he effectively presented the obverse of pluralism-the phenomenon of a heterogeneous apartheid-evolving unevenly since the end of Reconstruction with the codification of segregation in the South, continuing with the tightening of racially-based immigration and naturalization restrictions, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, culminating in the sustained attack on systems of Native American tribal land ownership, enshrined in the Dawes Act of 1887, and reaching apotheosis with the United States' acquisition of its first definitively imperial possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific after 1898.

Any elaboration of cultural pluralism in America, according to



RECODING EMPIRE 477

McWilliams, had to begin with a recognition of this history, and with a concerted attack on manifold, "regional" color-lines. Writers in Com- mon Ground were thus incredibly prescient, linking arguments against racially exclusive immigration and naturalization provisions with those calling for an end to what was then referred to as the southern caste system. In terms of changes in the law alone, most of what they called for was not even approached until 1965.16 Far from embracing the contemporary view that understands continuing segregation as a failure on the part of minority groups (and blacks in particular) to graduate into the competitive pantheon of American ethnicities, McWilliams's account suggests the ways in which the national-social formation has been consolidated by relativizing some differences and categorizing others-by a set of inclusionary and exclusionary "ethnic" and "racial" interpellations-in which pluralism has always been the complemen- tary face of assimilation. The melting pot worked for European settlers and migrants, in other words; the question was whether "American pluralism" and "American democracy" would be able to assimilate those who for decades upon centuries had been deemed unassimilable.

Even if this more fully elaborated reading of McWilliams is correct, it is still possible to mount a serious objection. Gary Gerstle and Stephen Fraser, for example, argue that the problem with the cultural pluralism of the 1940s is that it was part of a broader process in which (proto-Marxian) universals pertaining to labor and the class struggle in the U. S. were eclipsed in "the substitution of race for class as the great unsolved problem in American life.""7 To understand McWilliams's argument as proposing an elevation of "race" over "class," however, would be to miss something crucial about the context of his work and the larger discussion in which it was embedded. For the writers of the Popular Front, it was the irreducible relationship of labor to questions of race and nationality that was at issue. As Michael Denning argues, these writers were actually responding to the dramatic racial transformations of the American working-class signaled by what McWilliams termed the "factories in the fields," or the increasing reliance upon Mexican and Phillippino/a migrant labor in the South and West (largely due to the closing of immigration after 1924), as well as the defense industry driven out-migration of blacks and whites from the American South, "the largest internal migration in U.S. history."'8 In addition, as the Marxist sociologist Oliver Cox argued in characteristic language of the period, fascism inaugurated a fundamental crisis within "Western




Civilization," one whose resolution turned upon the clarification of "the public meaning" of the "West's" most universal term: democracy. For Cox and other black radical intellectuals during the period, the "proletarian meaning" of democracy held two ideas in inextricable tension: putting an end to labor exploitation and solving what was then called "the national question."9

At the risk of collapsing these distinctions, McWilliams put matters in a decidedly Americanist idiom. The overriding issue, according to him, was whether "we" would live up to "our revolutionary tradition" at home and in the world, or whether this tradition would be "perverted .... becom[ing] our most embarrassing liability" (48). So far I have de- fended the authentically radical, political implications of his understanding of cultural pluralism. Yet, as this statement makes clear, it is still possible to read McWilliams's harnessing of the political imperative to social change and racial justice to the overriding cause of national legitimacy and security with a contemporary multiculturalist's scepticism. Here, the final appeal to a national "we" might be understood as a cover for ethnocentric designs in which plurality is readily assimilated (even sacrificed) to a singular and repressive, national norm.20 Yet, this reading is only possible if we continue to construe arguments about race and nation in the 1940s simply as a reflex of current debates. Indeed, the brand of "nationalism" asserted in the pages of Common Ground ("making civilization safe for differences," as Adamic put it), looks very different in comparison to alternative ways of conceptualizing the inner and outer national lineaments of American nationhood that were available during this period.21

For example, Henry Luce's vision of an "American Century" was far more influential than the proposals of McWilliams, Adamic, or Cox on how to govern the peace, and provided what would become the more enduring and fundamental historical rationale for an expanded Ameri- can state-form and understanding of national mission after World War II. Luce, the great cultural industrialist of TIME, Inc., clearly understood that the fortunes of his own publishing empire were calibrated in a direct way to the very idea of the state he hoped to constitute-one with an expansive global reach. In his famous manifesto, Luce called upon America "as the most powerful and vital nation in the world .... to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit."22 Indeed, despite his bitter hostility to what he viewed as the growing national-social state at home, instituted under



RECODING EMPIRE 479

the auspices of the New Deal, Luce like McWilliams was actually part of a politically heterogeneous group of enthusiasts for what would be popularized by Wendell Wilkie as One World (1943), or as Luce put it "the idea that "our world of 2,000,000,000 is for the first time in history. . . . fundamentally indivisible" (29). Anticipating the bi- partisanship that has characterized the governance of foreign affairs ever since his famous essay, Luce was even willing to concede Roosevelt's genius for recognizing that "American democracy" could no longer work on a narrow materialistic and nationalistic basis," but only in terms of "a vital international economy and international moral order" (25).

Above all else, however, "The American Century" was a conscious rationalization for containing the reformist impulse of the New Deal at home, while re-orienting the expanded power of the U.S. state according to the prior cartographies of empire. In this vision, "U.S. power and ideals (which Luce defined in simple conservative terms as law, truth, charity and freedom) would be imposed on the world as kind of dispensation."23 With almost refreshing candor, "The American Cen- tury" thus also displayed the decidedly more unilateral and cynical side of Luce's worldly commitments:

It is the manifest duty of this country to undertake to feed all the people of the world who as a result of this worldwide collapse of civilization are hungry and destitute-all of them that is, whom we can from time to time reach consistently with a very tough attitude to all hostile governments. For every dollar we spend on armaments, we should spend at least a dime in the gigantic effort to feed the world. (37)

This is not to say that there was not also a strain of idealism in Luce:

Shall we use some big words like Democracy and Freedom and Justice? Yes, we can use the big words. The President has already used them. And perhaps we had better get used to using them again. Maybe they do mean something-about the future as well as the past. (21)

It is important, however, to be clear about one central point: "The American Century" calculated American prerogatives in the post- World War II order in the imperialist rhetoric of a "civilizing" mission. America in Luce's words had become the "sanctuary of the idea of civilization" in the wake of the European catastrophe, and was thus the legitimate "inheritor of all the great principles of Western Civilization" (39). In other words, despite the ostensible universalism of his global




pronouncements, any reader during this period would have understood Luce's bullying bravado ("the right to go with our ships and ocean- going airplanes, where we wish, when we wish and as we wish"), his ambivalence about democracy, and his defense of the civilizing project of the "West" as constituting a distinct political identity.

Franklin Roosevelt, for example, in keeping with his more or less successful symbolic mediation of national and global divisions during this period (that is, labor and capital; colonizers and colonized), divisions that would sharpen considerably by the war's end, crafted a rejoinder to Luce, arguing that the war had actually created the novel condition of a "world civilization":

Today the embattled youth of Russia and China are realizing a new individual dignity, casting off the last links of the ancient chains of imperial despotism which had bound them for so long. This a development of historic importance. It means that the old term "Western Civilization," no longer applies. World events and the common needs of all humanity are joining the culture of Asia with the culture of Europe and of the Americas to form, for the first time, a real world civilization.24

Roosevelt's studied omission of the parts of the world colonized by Europe-in particular Africa-from his imaginary map of "world civilization" is telling; as is the none too subtle elision of the question of imperialism with the racial figure of "ancient imperial [re: Oriental] despotism." Both illustrate the significant flexibility with which terms such as "empire" could be deployed, to signify the antithesis (rather than the extension) of "modem capitalist democracy," what Roosevelt termed "democratic civilization."25 Still, Roosevelt introduced an important modification in the rhetoric of "American Civilization" by explicitly refusing to elide America with the "West" or the "West" with an ideal or universal set of principles. That same year (responding to vigorous black protest), he issued the first federal statute on racial matters in the United States since the Reconstruction era, Executive Order 8802, mandating levels of "Negro" employment in Defense industries, and the creation of a Fair Employment Practices Commis- sion (FEPC). These two acts together implicitly affirmed what became an explicit feature of the official U.S. public sphere by the end of the war: namely that "human rights abroad and civil rights at home" were inextricably linked.26

Roosevelt's most important public pronouncements during this period were decisively influenced by his Vice-President, Henry Wallace.



RECODING EMPIRE 481

A key figure on the left-wing of the New Deal coalition, Wallace and the group of liberal intellectuals associated with him at periodicals like Common Ground, The Nation, and The New Republic believed that the war would have social revolutionary consequences within the world- system. In what was a more definitive rebuke of Luce's "American Century," Wallace instead proposed that the post-World War II period would inaugurate "The Century of the Common Man," or the "People's Century:" "Some have spoken of the American Century. I say that the century on which we are entering-the century which will come out of this war--can and must be the century of the common man."27 Innovating a rhetoric that would remain central within the cold war imaginary, Wallace called World War II "a fight between a slave world and a free world. Just as the United States in 1862 could not remain half slave and half free, so in 1942, the world must make its decision for complete victory one way or another" (190). Though Wallace's notions of "the people's century," and the "people's revolution" were firmly rooted in American historical analogies that admitted little in the way of heterogeneity of identity and purpose within the world encompassed by the war, Wallace was adamant that "those who write the peace must think of the whole world." After the war, he declared, in a phrase often echoed by Roosevelt, "there can be no privileged peoples" (194).

Wallace's vision of a post-war world order was powerful to the extent that it remained steeped in the commercial and providential rhetorics of an American nationalist and exceptionalist conception of universalism. This is perhaps one reason why at the onset of the cold war, Dwight MacDonald argued that Wallace was every bit as much the imperialist as Luce. "Although Wallace's slogan, 'The People's Cen- tury,' was evolved as a counter to Henry Luce's 'The American Century,'" MacDonald suggested, "it is difficult to find significant differences between the two." Since he was "a reactionary," MacDonald confided, Luce was willing "to put things bluntly, without the double- talk to which liberals are accustomed."28 Yet, from the vantage point of MacDonald's own self-described "choice" of "the West" in the cold war there may have been a significant political investment in erasing the substantive political differences between Wallace's and Luce's understanding of America as the bearer of a universal civilization within the post-World War II world order. I would argue that Wallace's universalism was fundamentally ideal in character and appealed to the insurrectionary, republican demand for liberty and equality derived




from a long, revolutionary, democratic tradition thought to precede and exceed the social institution of modem states. Under this view the unconditional democratic demand-so closely identified with the question of racial exclusion-could also at least theoretically supersede capitalist property relations. Luce's conception of the universal, by contrast, was cleverly crafted in the very name of the American state, as an established political institution, and in relation to its conservation of a supranational cultural lineage recoded as the characteristic political and economic forms of Euroamerican modernity (that is, "Western capitalist democracy").29

Within the black public sphere of the early 1940s there was little difficulty in identifying what was at stake in these conflicting constructions of civilization. Nor was this based upon an unqualified endorse- ment of Wallace's "People's Century," or the faulty conflation of republicanism with American nationalism. Ralph Ellison and Angelo Herndon, editors of the left-wing Negro Quarterly, for example, lexically transformed Wallace's univocal "People's Century" into a call for "the peoples' century," and argued further that when one looked for "the basic outlines of a democratic vision of life," and "the truly human motivation behind this potentially peoples' war. . . . [O]ne finds it expressed most intensely among the darker peoples."30 Just as important, Ellison and Herndon were attuned to the powerful deceptions of political rhetoric in the moment of crisis:

This war has brought about the greatest upset of human values and assumptions the world has ever known. The plans of Roosevelt and Churchill are mocked by the vision of a world they flirt with but fear to embrace. Liberal Democracy plays Hamlet, while the "great sickness" spreads from within, allowing Fascism at the very moment it begins to lost battles, to win its greatest victories. For the Four Freedoms is a vison that must be embraced wholly or else it changes its shape to confound us. ... If minority and colonial peoples are to be convinced that the statements of Wallace rather than those of Churchill embody Allied intentions, and that the action of the Senate does not express the Administration's Negro Policy then let us see convincing action.3'

From across the black popular front, the characteristic view of the war was expressed in the unconditional demand that "victory must bring in its train the liberation of all peoples."32 It was W. E. B. Du Bois more than any other figure who developed the most comprehensive theoretical framework for these ideas, and attempted to specify what



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was at stake. Like many others, Du Bois viewed the specter of empires--not "ancient," but "modern"ones-as the greatest threat to post-war peace. As he summarized in his famous appeal, "Human Rights for All Minorities," the achievement of "human rights" for the world's minorities "that together form a majority," required the abolition of "colonial and quasi-colonial conditions. . . . [of which] every civilized man is part and parcel."33 Turning the very discourse of civilization back upon itself, Du Bois argued that "the colonial status.... form[ed] an integral and fundamental part of modern civilization," and exposed the non-universal, and contingent aspects of the achievements of the "West" (182). Engaging the widespread agreement among all one worlders about the real universality of the world-system, Du Bois claimed that this was now the necessary and proper horizon for all political and moral judgments about humanity. Finally, with startling foresight, he challenged "the dominant majority which calls itself the world" to consider something that has perhaps only recently become visible on a world-scale: the enduring centrality of minorities and the dissolution of stable, unquestioned majorities (181).

Du Bois was actually arguing a position he had been stressing since World War I, namely that resolving the political status of minority populations, colonial questions, and in particular the situation of Africa, held the real keys to world peace.34 Anticipating Hannah Arendt's famous post-World War II axiom that only nationality could secure human rights, Du Bois believed that a stable peace would only be assured at the point when the non-national character of the world's "colonial or quasi-colonial peoples" had been resolved; in other words, when the imperialist or "master nations," as he called them, "either integrated their colonial subjects into the polity, or allowed them to become independent, free peoples."35 What this formulation implied was that the full extension of the nation-form to all of humanity (that is, its universalization) was the crucial step to resolving inequalities among the world's inhabitants. Like both Luce and Wallace, in other words, Du Bois identified universality (or civilization) with the institutional agency of the democratic, nation-state within the world-system. The fundamental difference of course, was that like his contemporary Cox, Du Bois refused to view the Euroamerican seizure of the world as establishing either the legitimate conditions or originary cultural or institutional terms under which this process needed to proceed.

Moreover, Du Bois's prophetic comment that black people in the




United States were "a nation without a polity, nationals without citizenship," was a stark reminder of the non-universal character of American nationalism. Indeed, "Human Rights for All Minorities," implied that the black struggle for nationality within the United States had itself now assumed a certain universal character. Thus it was that his remarkable declaration that "a belief in humanity is a belief in colored men" took on a surprising resonance in the post-war world.36 Less prone to flights of American utopianism than many of his contemporaries, Du Bois instead offered what would become a characteristic warning after the war that "the Negro Problem forces the United States to abdicate its natural leadership of democracy in the world."37 Above all, Du Bois emphasized that racism, fascism and colonialism comprised a singular history. Lest anyone had forgotten, in the shadow of discredited and soon defeated Nazi ideals of Nordic superiority, he reminded them that it was the moral, intellectual and legal traditions of race hate in America that inspired the Nazi campaign against the Jews, "establishing it on American lines of caste conditions, disenfranchise- ment, mob murder, ridicule and public disparagement.38

For a surprisingly wide range of black intellectuals in the early 1940s, the world within America had to change, because the world beyond American borders presented the possibility of wider, imagined publics-indeed the majority of the people on the planet-who were similarly blocked or restricted with respect to questions of nationality. Articulating a theme that has endured across the spectrum of black political practices in the United States ever since, it is especially difficult to find a work concerned with racial matters written during the 1940s that does not distinguish both the national and universal dimensions of the "Negro problem" in this manner. In an astonishingly wide-range of writings, black cultural formations, and institutional deliberations, black intellectuals and activists argued that they were the true bearers of universality within the United States, and within the world-system. Harlem journalist Roi Ottley's aptly titled A New World- a-Coming (1943) is just one example of this new sense of what I call black worldliness:

Events abroad have lifted the 'Negro Problem' out of its limited orbit of a strictly domestic issue. Today, more and more, race and color questions are being thrown into the public scene. The Negro's future-and what he thinks it should be-is of great consequence. . . . Black men in this country-a



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group larger than some nations involved in the war-are feeling a great resurgence of racial kinship to other colored peoples of the world. And this is acutely the concern of white America.9

Of course there remained latent divisions between black political formations within the ambit of communism, like the National Negro Congress, the Council on African Affairs, and the Civil Rights Con- gress, and organizations such as the NAACP, divisions that would explode into bitter conflicts as black leaders such as Walter White and A. Philip Randolph were selectively drafted into the cold war. What remains unprecedented, however, is the richness of, and the depth of understanding within, the 1940s black public sphere, as it articulated itself around the pressing "national questions" raised by the war. For a brief moment, even former (and soon to be again) bitter enemies, like the cautious, reformist White, and the internationalist, left-leaning Du Bois, were reconciled as officially designated observers to the charter- ing of the United Nations. At the same time, the NAACP, for the first and perhaps the last time, verged upon becoming a mass movement.

For U.S. military commanders, members of Congress, and even some members of Roosevelt's cabinet, the new spirit of black militancy was immediately labeled "subversive"; black newspapers were sum- marily banned from military bases, and black leaders were put under increasing surveillance. Significantly, the FBI's investigation of "For- eign Inspired Agitation among American Negroes" also began in 1942 (modeled on the work done among Japanese Americans) establishing the intelligence structure and underlying objectives for future "racial intelligence" work, culminating in the infamous investigations of the civil rights movement and the disasterous COINTELPRO operations of the late 1960s.40

There is little question that the emerging national security state registered with alarm and concern the powerful conjoining of struggles for domestic citizenship and visions of worldly emancipation in the writings of so many black intellectuals from this period. At the same time, a more studied, public response was also required, one which finally began to crystallize in the mid-1940s in the form of a quasi- official, U.S. race-relations complex. Ultimately, it was the Carnegie Corporation that organized and produced the single most exhaustive race project in U.S. history, one that provided a discursive framework weighty enough to meet the domestic challenge of the "American




Century," or resolving what would soon be known as "the American dilemma."41 Offering supervision of the project to the Swedish econo- mist Gunnar Myrdal in 1938 (and passing over Du Bois's own long- standing proposal to compile a Negro Encyclopedia), Carnegie fash- ioned An American Dilemma in the style and image of the Rockerfeller-funded War and Peace studies that were concurrently undertaken under the auspices of the Department of State.42 Each marked the beginning of a much closer articulation of the work of intellectuals with what was understood to be (a more delimited conception of) the national interest. Frederick Keppel, representing the Carnegie Corporation, framed the project accordingly: "to review the most serious race problem in the country is an idea singularly American." When the study was finally released in 1944, Keppel greeted it as a moment of national and international significance:

[I]t is a day when the eyes of men of all races the world over are turned upon us to see how the people of the most powerful of the United Nations are dealing at home with a major problem of race relations. (xlvii, Ivii, my emphasis)

Myrdal repeatedly confirmed the idea that his project aimed at nothing less than the national and international legitimation of the American state. American claims to be "humanity-in-miniature" rested upon the resolution of the "Negro Problem." America was "free to choose whether the Negro shall remain her liability or become her opportunity." What hung in the balance was "the trust and support of all good people on earth" (1018). In contrast to the growing pessimism of Du Bois, Myrdal emphasized that in spite of the "world catastrophe" of war and holocaust, "we have today in social science a greater trust in the improvability of man and society than we have ever had since the Enlightenment." The epic study of American race relations was proof of this fact, since such an endeavor would have been tolerated in no other nation. Echoing Luce and Wallace, Myrdal summarized this line of argument, concluding that the publication of An American Dilemma represented the culmination of "the great tradition of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution" (1021-1024). Conflating Luce and Du Bois, he implied that the real significance of the 'Negro problem' was that it threatened to undermine the successful passage of the West's civilizing mission to America. Finally, in the most famous and enduring dictum of the study, Myrdal proclaimed "great reason for hope":



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This country has a national theory, if not a consistent practice, of freedom and equality for all. What America is constantly reaching for is democracy at home and abroad. The main trend in its history is the gradual realization of the American Creed. (3)

There is no question that the Myrdal study contributed in important ways to the early civil rights initiatives of this period. In fact, once the cold war began in earnest, Myrdal himself would be among those cast under suspicion of membership within what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. famously dubbed "the liberal fifth column in America."43 Nonetheless, The American Dilemma also helped establish the rhetorical framework in which the liberal, perfectionist emphasis upon racial reform within the United States, has been understood ever since, namely as something that is paradoxically always already accomplished, and something that is never quite complete. At the same time, at a theoretical level, Myrdal's work accomplished something even more important; it effectively severed the connection between racial division and such putatively "modernizing," or universalizing processes as capitalist industri- alization and class formation. Race for Myrdal was an atavistic caste prescription in which the irrationalities of a sexual prophylaxis were paramount. For contemporary students of race in the modern world like Du Bois, Cox, and Ellison, and their contemporaries C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, and Richard Wright, this thesis was a profound mystifi- cation of the extent to which racialism itself was a crucial component of the "inventory of capitalist labor disciplines" that had shaped the modern world-system since the early sixteenth century.44 Rather than being a function of "backwardness," intranational racial difference and political exclusion were understood by the theorists of the black popular front as the products of the imperialist history of modern capitalism. There were no guarantees that the American nation-state would effectively rewrite this history as a global narrative of democratic promise--only stark political choices to be made. During the cold war, everything would hinge upon the evasion of this fundamental fact.

II. From the Cold War to the Multiculture

What do "liberals" really stand to gain from their present frenetic support of Russia except their own political death? A world-wide victory of Stalin would mean their immediate extinction. On the other hand they would fall as




the first victims of a terror of the Right as American public opinion becomes solidly mobilized against Russian aggressions. ... If certain "liberals" insist on digging their own graves. .... we hope they are not past pleading with that they are dragging down in their ruin everyone else who genuinely desires the values .... of traditional liberalism.

-Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "The Liberal Fifth Column in America" (1946)

The great mass of the intellectuals go with the power.

-C. L. R. James, American Civilization (1950)

The wide-ranging conversations about the situation of labor, the rights of racial minorities, and the colonized, and the relationship of these to the worldly-indeed universal-projections of American national power were effaced by the polymorphous anti-communism of the U.S./Soviet cold war. What would prove definitive in the period that followed, was only just beginning in 1945. On the other side of the world, on the horizons of empire, U.S. merchant marines began transporting some 12,000 French combat troops through the South China sea to Conchin China, now Vietnam. Hearkening back upon what Ralph Ellison had described as "the peoples' aspect of the war," the crew of the S.S. Winchester cabled President Truman in protest.45 Despite all the ink and blood that has been spilled on this question, these seamen asked something that remains widely unacknowledged in the fumbling mystifications of the discourse of debacle, mistake and syndrome. Why, they asked, "are American vessels. . . . carrying foreign combat troops to foreign soil for the purpose of engaging in hostilities to further the imperialist policies of foreign governments when there are American soldiers waiting to come home?"46

The ideological framework of the cold war dramatically reshuffled the terms of the political discourses of the early 1940s, creating a new understanding of American universalism that tied together a celebration of America's pluralism and political exceptionalism with the fate of "the West" as a whole. By 1948, of course, the more scrupulous universalism of Du Bois or McWilliams was an anathema to the emerging, anti-communist consensus, and would be cast beyond re- spectable discussion as the functional equivalent of treason. Within this view, legitimate American power was sealed with the identification of democracy and capitalism as the twin products of a civilizing (now modernizing) Western political tradition, while the Soviet Union embodied all that was wrong with the world, in a perverse metonymic



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chain that equated social and political revolution with despotism and empire. The question of the perversion of revolutionary traditions- first posed by McWilliams-was of course, a real one, but by the cold war, it could only be projected outward. The perversion within, once unloosed, became the many proliferating objects of political demonol- ogy that have menaced "normal" Americans ever since.

The stark opposition between liberal democracy and communist/ fascist totalitarianism was the "theoretical anchor of the cold war discourse."47 The vicious brutalities of Stalinism notwithstanding, it took a great deal of intellectual work to conflate the communist "other" with the fascist "other." At the same time, it was considerably less plausible to hope to harmonize the legacies of colonialism and racism with the universalizing aspirations of America's capitalist democracy. The discourse of totalitarianism, in this sense, actually worked to suspend and even conceal the issue of colonialism behind a cold war screen, long enough to complete the primary tasks of reconstructing Western Europe, and establishing the military, economic and political bases of American global succession and preeminence. As early as 1942, for example, U.S. policymakers at the Council on Foreign Relations had planned for America's military and economic control of a "Grand Area," including "the Western Hemisphere, the United Kingdom, the remainder of the British Commonwealth and Empire, the Dutch East Indies, China and Japan" at the end of the war.48 After all, Roosevelt's "four freedoms" had never implied that justice would not be achieved under capitalism, and said nothing at all about zones of trade and spheres of influence.

The extensive body of revisionist work unmasking the economic interests of U.S. global designs after World War II, however, does not help us to unravel the cultural and political logics of American projections of universality during this period, unless the latter are understood via a reductive economism as mere mystifications of the former.49 The cold war, for example, bequeathed to us the characteristic cultural contents of the contemporary American imagination of itself and the world, replete with a refurbished set of stock phrases and ideas: "the free world," "the American way of life," "Judeo-Christian Civiliza- tion," "the First World," and "the West." George Kennan's rejection of "all idealistic slogans and unreal objectives," and his call for the use of "straight power concepts" in foreign policy went largely unheeded by the architects of cold war liberalism.50 At the ideological level at least,




anti-fascism, anti-communism, and anti-imperialism coexisted in an uneasy partnership in the governing vision of U.S. post-World War II promise: universal nationhood and liberal, capitalist democracy.

More significant and enduring in my view is the fact that in contrast to the civilizing imperialism of England and France, the launching of American internationalism, hegemony, and claims to universality since World War II has been couched within the widely held argument that the United States is the world's exemplary nation-state, already the bearer of universality, within itself. U.S. world-ordering aspirations were explicitly legitimated by claiming the virtues of internal democracy, or the harmonious cooperation of different groups within the vast national body, and the broad toleration of cultural, religious, ethnic and racial differences within America. The visible signs of black protest and labor unrest throughout the 1940s, and continuing existence of Jim Crow, presented serious obstacles to the effective articulation of this ideological vision. At the same time, liberal anti-communists faced the distinct problem that many of their most important allies in government were outright racists and isolationists, men who had long associated anti-communism with nativism, and used red scare tactics as a weapon in aid of white supremacy. As Manning Marable writes, "Every defender of racial segregation in Congress was also a devout proponent of anti-communist legislation."5' Would be Dixiecrats such as Bilbo, Eastland, and Thurmond thus repeatedly attributed any evidence of black protest or discontent to communist subversion and foreign propaganda, one of the most effective southern strategies in the twentieth century.

To make matters more complex many black leaders had come to believe that their success was dependent upon "whether or not the espousal of civil rights for Negroes. ... [was] separated in the popular mind from Communist agitation."52 Thus, White, Randolph, and others willingly sacrificed black leftists such as Du Bois and Paul Robeson to prosecution under state sedition laws, while simultaneously elevating anti-communism to an unprecedented centrality within anti-racist struggles.53 Typical was Randolph's suggestion that segregation had become "the greatest single propaganda and political weapon in the hands of Russia and international communism today.""4 In other words, while the specter of communism provided cover for Jim Crow, it was also paradoxically the basis for attacking the South as anti-democratic and pressing demands for black equality. The periodic slippages and



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contradictions within the cold war discourse of democracy between anti-communism, racism, and anti-racism effectively complicated Ameri- can management of domestic and international affairs through a binary, cold war formula. By exposing racism as integral to the American system, anti-racist politics became a diplomatic embarrassment that simply would not go away.

Two central problems faced the architects and guardians of a cold war liberal order: 1) to contain the most pervasive aspects of American racism; and 2) to de-link anti-communism from any associations with xenophobia or despotic power. Thus, "racism," rather than a matter of a global injustice, was increasingly viewed as a matter of national security, and was commonly described during this period "as our most exposed feature and our most vulnerable weakness.""55 At the same time, the growing prominence of the House Un-American Activities Committee suggested that the domestic political purges had the potential to become the terror from the right anticipated by Schlesinger. What has never been sufficiently analyzed or understood, in my view, is the degree to which these two agendas informed one and other in the massive, discursive endeavor to write American racial and ethnic history that began during the early cold war. Although it is not possible for me to undertake a complete analysis of this phenomenon, I will attempt to briefly outline how I think it has shaped some of the subsequent mediations within the culture wars.

C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), written at the height of the cold war, remains the most remarkably vivid, and in many ways unsurpassed account of this period. It was Woodward, for instance, who first popularized the language character- izing the post-World War II decades as a "Second Reconstruction":

The attack that led to the downfall of the old order in race relations had many preliminaries as we have seen, but after the Second World War it moved into an accelerated phase, the pace and radicalism of which would justify calling it a Second Reconstruction.56

Woodward recognized, very early on, something that has since faded from view: that a negotiated solution to the problem of "the Negro's" civil rights was integral to engineering the cold war liberal consensus within the United States. Moreover, although Woodward did not deliver a complete analysis of this phenomenon, he recognized the existence of a dialectical nexus linking expanded state power and the "advancement




against segregation and discrimination." This, he summarized insightfully, was "a product of the same forces that have produced the oppressive wave of conformity, international tension, intensified nationalism, and war, both hot and cold."57

In retrospect it is clear that writing from securely within the camp of cold war liberalism, Woodward preferred racial reform when it was a state-managed project, to the moment when it became associated with various forms of ghetto insurgency after 1965. In the mid-1950s, however, his work was a passionate appeal for racial equality and an uncompromising condemnation of the racism that had destroyed earlier radical and reform movements within U.S. history. What was most path-breaking about Woodward's account was that he attempted to give racism a history in the context of the revolutionary transformations of U.S. society and the post-World War II global order. His thinking along these lines was heavily indebted to Charles Beard's argument that the Civil War was actually a "Second American Revolution."58 In this context, Woodward's view that a "Second Reconstruction" had now followed upon the heels of World War II, was extremely suggestive. With at least one eye glancing backwards upon the people's aspect of the war, Woodward suggested that the end of Jim Crow would mark the completion of America's own democratic revolution, with the implica- tion that the "American Century" might just be a "People's Century" after all.

Woodward's pioneering analysis focused on the sectional compromise that ended the first Reconstruction and the defeat of the Populist Party in the 1890s that postponed southern modernity. The discussion of populism remains especially salient here, because it is here that Woodward famously identified the primary historical agency for the perpetuation of racism in modern times with the actions of the "poor whites," people psychologically prone to irrational hatred, and easily manipulated by demagogic politicians. It is somewhat ironic that Woodward, whose early work iconoclastically reclaimed the populists as modernizers and forerunners of southern racial liberals like himself, wound up by emphasizing their "capitulation to racism" as the linchpin of "Jim Crow," and as the reason for the South's "colonial status," or enduring "backwardness," into the twentieth century.59 While partially correct, this emphasis significantly understated the degree to which the New South project and the segregationist compromise that engendered it, was itself a distinctively modernizing one that was forged in



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corporate board rooms by northern industrialists like Andrew Carnegie working in an alliance with emergent urban industrial interests in the South, who were willing to forego land reform in the interest of fashioning a hegemonic consensus with the sons of the planter elite. Rather than an atavism akin to colonialism then, the New South was in fact anticipatory of neo-colonial solutions to the problems of labor and modernization in which formal freedom co-existed with generalized patterns of internal exclusion throughout the nation.60

The cold war thematics of southern colonialism have dominated accounts of the history of the U.S. South ever since, creating a situation in which notions of southern exceptionalism have paradoxically rein- forced the sense of American exceptionalism by failing to locate the history and development of the South within a synthetic account of capitalist nation-formation. American Marxists such as Eugene Genovese perpetuated this tendency by counterposing in a rigid and single- minded way northern "free labor," and the slave South as antithetical social, cultural and economic systems. In a formulation clearly shaped by cold war logic, Genovese was even willing to argue that the southern planters mounted the "only serious internal opposition to the powerful, confident bourgeoisie in U.S. history."61 According to Marx's own writings on the Civil War, by contrast, "the South was a dissenting but bourgeois part of a bourgeois Republic ... not a moral unity ... not a country . . . but a battle cry."62 What is perhaps most consequential about the most influential "southern" history written during the cold war is its studied failure to recognize the disproportionate impact of the South upon the nation as a whole-"a system of industry that ruined democracy," as Du Bois put it in Black Reconstruction in America (1935). "The last Great Battle of the West," in Du Bois's memorable phrase, was the struggle to destroy all vestiges of this system. What this would require, however, was more than simply counterposing freedom and slavery in the manner of cold war discourse, but learning the hard lesson of the way in which freedom was itself truncated and corrupted by slavery and its legacy.63

If the cold war history of the South was written as a particularist, regional narrative, the emergent fields of immigration history and U.S. ethnic history seized the mantle of a national-universal narrative in which a progressive teleology of immigrant succession superceded the on-going "dilemmas" of racial formation. In spite of McWilliams's insistence that an elaboration of cultural pluralism needed to begin with




a concerted attack on the color line, by the 1950s, a generic model of ethnicity re-framed the most salient discussions of intranational differences from the 1940s in terms of a notion of religious diversity and universal toleration. In his 1950 classic, Race and Nationality in American Life, for example, Oscar Handlin argued that for immigrants, America was "the mother of all Republics." Drawing upon the work of McWilliams, Handlin starkly shifted its emphasis, proposing that "the Negro, Catholic and Jew" actually had the same stake in American society, because they were all held together as "objects of prejudice."64 The awakening of America's "minorities," during the 1930s, Handlin suggested, would not have been possible were it not for the general toleration afforded to ethnic groups in America. This awakening was so successful, he claimed, that "it [was] no longer appropriate at all to refer to minorities as a feature of American life," nor possible to find "a reputable American exponent of racist views" (147). It was only a matter of time, he concluded, that segregation would also be ended, at which point "we would see. . . . [if] Negroes would achieve an adjustment that would permit them to co-operate creatively with the other ethnic groups of which America is composed (173, emphasis added)." What this confirmed, yet again, was America's universalism, the idea that "the attributes of Americanism were. .... appropriate to the people of the whole world" (198).

The writing of ethnicity and race as a narrative of civic religiosity was advanced considerably by Will Herberg in his influential work of the period, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955). According to Herberg, the national community had been defined primarily in terms of its common Judeo-Christian affiliations. "Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism in America," he argued, constituted "the three great branches of division of American religion."65 This religion was more familiarly known as "the American Way of Life," Herberg continued, which was something that "supplie[d] American society with an overarching sense of unity amid conflict" (75)" The only exceptions to this rule, for Herberg, were those groups classified as "national cultural minorities." A national cultural minority, he defined as "an ethnic group that becomes permanent and self-perpetuating,. ... appears as an alien "race,".... and is confronted with the same problems and difficulties as id.e the Negroes and men and women of Oriental ancestry" (37). This belated consideration not only erased "ethnic" difference and absolutized "racial" difference; it also displaced crucial questions of determination



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and responsibility back onto racialized groups themselves, such that these groups were now "self-perpetuating." Moreover, as in Handlin, Herberg's studied use of the functionalist repertoire-"problems," "difficulties," and "adjustments"-recast racial exclusion in the United as a "minor" issue at once subsumed within and incidental to a national narrative of ethnic succession.

The writings of Herberg and Handlin exemplify the substantive erasure of questions of intranational differences during the cold war, as each of them rewrote earlier pluralist accounts in terms of a teleological production of a racially and ethnically unmarked national-subject, one presumably more suitable to the civilizational struggle between the "American way of life" and ("godless") communism. In fact, during his own involvement with communism during the mid- 1930s, Herberg actually wrote essays on Marxism, "the Negro," and "the national question."66 His staunch rejection of communism and his religious turn were, in this sense, of a piece with his abandonment of interest in the problems of black national subjectivity. These cold war preoccupations also shaped his seminal contribution to the institution of what I would argue is the primarily symbolic, implicitly "white" sense of ethnicity that is generally held today: a competitive, yet benign form of difference, enabling a degree of functional adjustment to America, and superceding all national, colonial and racial questions. While this split between what we now call "race" and "ethnicity" was to some extent implicit in McWilliams and Adamic in the 1940s, Herberg and Handlin in the 1950s, and their successors such as Glazer and Moynihan in the 1960s and 70s, began to constitute a school of thinking in which (white) ethnicity has become the normalized standard by which forms of racially-coded difference are interpreted. It is important to recognize how within this reasoning an unmarked, national-subject exists as the unstated horizon for every discussion of our salient differences.67 In this argument, in other words, the "national question" is answered, before it has even been asked.

Of course, questions of race and racism continued to trouble cold war liberal writings about nationhood. In the 1960s this would key such important innovations as Moynihan's account of black family pathol-

ogy, which provided an ethically plausible way of explicitly recasting black people outside the circuits of symbolic kinship comprising the national community. The problem of overt racism and racial division, however, persisted despite predictions to the contrary, and required




intellectual rationalizations of a significantly different order. Here, something like Woodward's narrow socio-psychological understanding of racism as a form of anti-modem "prejudice," the province of mass psychology, and popular politics, rather than the equal product of a hegemonic, state-building compromise, has proved decisive. Not only did this conception further establish race as primarily a southern question, but it also constituted racism as the problem of an obdurate, even "savage" mind--whose regressive, primitive tendencies needed to be held in check. Marking what I would call a racist displacement of racism, Woodward's account was actually embedded in a more comprehensive critique of populism and popular racism that developed during the 1950s.68 Although Woodward was once again exceptional in his early, positive assessments of the possibilities of popular radicalism from below, his ultimate conclusions about "populism" dovetailed with those of a larger group of "consensus" figures such as Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Richard Hofstadter for whom populism became the paradigmatic case of American-style xenophobia.

These intellectuals all viewed themselves as enlightened elites and as modernizers, and were suspicious of the radicalism of the left and the right, but especially of the rabble. During the cold war, as Michael Kazin writes in his important book The Populist Persuasion (1994), "populism" became "the great fear of the liberal intellectuals," symp- tomatic of their "suspicion of mass democracy unrestrained by institutional rules and rulers and unmediated by rational intellects like themselves.""69 These thinkers were especially hostile to forms of demagogic, anti-communism of the McCarthyite variety. Nevertheless, they were fully ensconced within "elite anticommunism," and they remained convinced, of the equation of communist and fascist totalitarianism, the triumphalist virtue of American democracy, the inherent rationality of the liberal welfare-state, the unquestioned success of corporate capitalism, and in certain cases, the necessity of milder forms of "red-hunting."70 Perhaps most important of all, these intellectuals had an abiding faith in the power of their own knowledge-projects and in their own importance to the effective, state management of the corporate-liberal order.

The intellectual critique of populism, Kazin suggests, as much as it was explicitly aimed at McCarthyism and anything that smacked of xenophobia, saturated the liberal intelligentsia with distrust and antipa- thy toward



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the very kinds of white Americans-Catholic workers, military veterans, discontented families in the middle of the social structure-who had once been the foot soldiers in causes such as industrial unionism, the CIO and the Popular Front in the 1930s and 1940s.71

It was this tendency transferred wholesale into the student New Left, he argues, that effectively paved the way for the Reagan era reclamation of populism in the appeal to blue collar Americans, or the so-called Reagan democrats in the 1980s. "Until the 1940s," Kazin writes, "conservative populism was an oxymoron" (166). The New Left, despite its trenchant critique of corporate liberalism, furthered the alienation of a "left populist tradition" which had long dreamed of America as a producer's republic. This was an utterly "tragic" occur- rence, in his view, because it effectively ceded the most potent oppositional language in U.S. history to the contemporary forces of conservatism and reaction (217).

While Kazin acknowledges that the predominantly white, student movement took its cues from "the black crusade for freedom," in sharp contrast to Woodward, it is not the struggle for racial equality that defines his understanding of the epochal social and political transformations of the post-World War II era. Rather, he writes, it was the white, New Left's "focus on racial justice" that marked a "momentous break with the populist past" (198). While, Kazin suggests that this appeared to be a salutary development in the moment, it is something for which left and progressive movements since the 1960s have paid a very high price:

Not until later in the decade-when civil rights gave way to black power- did the political costs of this stance become clear. For white activists, a racially specific definition of the people tended to drown out the thin strains of majoritarian color-blind language that had resonated from the Popular Front. If Vietnam was a "white man's war" against a poor, yellow nation- as SNCC and other black groups charged-then white radicals inevitably took the side of the Vietcong. The American military had to be defeated for true freedom and democracy to triumph.... Young white radicals.... [thus] rejected the kind of public language most insurgents on the Left had employed, with a good deal of success, since the era of Andrew Jackson. Undeniably, the populist tradition had little room for blacks, women or Third World people as articulate makers of their own history. Yet, if ordinary Americans did not share a common identity as hardworking patriots set upon by an arrogant grasping elite, how could they ever cohere? How would the movement achieve the "democracy of individual participation" that was its founding purpose (200, emphasis added).




The reason I have recapitulated Kazin's argument at such length here is because it best exemplifies what I would argue is the current common-sense of an influential strand of liberal opinion on the 1960s, and its multiculturalist legacy. For, if the great fear of post-World War II liberal intellectuals was demagoguery and the xenophobia of the masses (McCarthyism as "Americanism with its sleeves rolled up"), the great fear of the post-Vietnam War liberal intellectuals has been the political militancy of people of color and its centrality within the left and progressive imaginary. As important as the critique of populism was for cold war liberals then, its reconsideration and revalorization has been important for a group of ex-New Left, and liberal historians attempting to understand the emergence of a right-wing populism, "the fall of the New Deal order," and the emergence of "a new Republican majority" in America after 1980.72 Where cold war liberals criticized populism and valorized an elitist brand of cosmopolitan universalism, Reagan era liberals have valorized populism and criticized those who would succor multiculturalism (especially its third worldist, and black nationalist idioms) as elitist betrayers of those who are imagined once again as the unmarked, the everyday, the ordinary Americans.

In the current consensus, two different (and at the same time, antagonistic) generations of post-World War II American intellectuals have actually been united in viewing the last years of the New Deal- the war years and the early 1940s-as a kind of golden age of American populism and popular Americanism, before its more recent decline, its rightist distortion and its leftist betrayal. What ties the cold war critique of populism to its contemporary reassessment is that both actually figure prominently within the liberal (and now neo-liberal) vision about how best to manage a universal national body and unify what is now viewed as the increasingly divided public sphere. In fact, the range of intellectual positions on populism, as Kazin's work suggests and unwittingly reconfirms, may tell us more about the relationship of liberal intellectuals to state power and the construction of political order, than about the history of populism. Above all, these positions have been an index for deciding how the contours of a decidedly national we should be defined in a given moment, a project in which the post-World War II liberal intelligentsia has played a decisive mediating role. What tends to be missing from the discourse of these intellectuals, however, is a more careful foregrounding of their own interestedness, and the ways they participate in the resolution of conflicts, the



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articulation of settlements and compromises of different ruling interests that comprise and sediment a particular "hegemonic bloc."73

Thus, while elite anti-communists may have despised McCarthy and his populist demagoguery, they actually had a great deal in common with him when it came to policing and normalizing the boundaries of acceptable national-political discourse in the 1950s. As Kazin's own work implies, during the cold war, the attack on populism, more than anything else, was an attack on any form of insurgency-especially from rank-and-file trade unionists-that threatened the bi-partisan consensus which had brought "a chastened Atlantic imperialism under American leadership. . . . and quickened the interpenetration of the major capitalist economies."74 Anti-communism, in other words, was the most important stabilizing feature of the cold war, not only because it served as a rubric for international capitalist reconstruction, but because it was the basis for undermining the excrescent left-wing hangovers from the New Deal era who stood in the way of this settlement, including left-wing trade unions, communists, black radicals, and pacifist internationalists.75

Meanwhile, the contemporary argument that the excesses of the movements of the 1960s and their translation within the idioms of multiculturalism amount to a betrayal of a "left" populist tradition, converges with the more overtly conservative attacks upon the social legacies of the 1960s, such as affirmative action, the expanded university (a bastion of "tenured radicals"), and the extension of state welfare provision. Although neo-populists like Kazin are opponents of Reaganism, there is actually little separating their understanding of where America went wrong during this period. Indeed, in his account the fact that the Vietnam War was an extension of the imperialist project, (not to mention the continuation of thirty years of virtually uninterrupted U.S. warfare in Asia) is simply omitted, as is the fact that the discourse of the cold war was actually re-invented during the so- called Reagan revolution, after it had been in recess for more than a decade. Reagan's "revolution from above," moreover, was launched at home in Mississippi, where the rugged individualist President pro- nounced himself a "state's righter," promised to wield his proverbial axe against a federal budget bloated by welfare cheats and self-serving bureaucrats, and initiated a "war on drugs," the result of which has been the unprecedented expansion of the incarcerated population within America. Abroad, it was promoted in a new round of tough-talking, and




counter-insurgency projects in Central America and the Caribbean, culminating (under Bush) in the exorcizing of the "Vietnam syndrome" over the skies of Bagdhad. It is only with the profoundest historical amnesia and reductionism that so much could be classed under the ambivalent moniker-conservative populism.

I am not suggesting that multiculturalism became the functional object of a new red scare during this period, a ridiculous exaggeration. However, as an analogue to the farcical reanimation of cold war discourse during the Reagan era, certain critiques of multiculturalism, (as the slippery coinage "the new McCarthyism" signifies all too plainly), have been mobilized through the prism of cold war imaginings of the nation. The trope of the cold war remains powerful (and appealing) for American liberalism because it apotheosizes the latter's endless quest for a universal enemy short of mobilizing the nation for war.76 As Christopher Lasch first recognized in his pioneering expose of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), the cold warriors were in this sense the first American intellectuals who understood themselves as culture warriors. They grasped the fact, as Tom Braden of the CCF said at the time, that "the cold war was and is a war, fought with ideas instead of bombs."77 More precisely, they were the one of the first generations of American intellectuals to self-consciously understand the relationship between ideas and bombs, or that their own role was to mediate the question of legitimate political violence-another way of saying that they wished to establish their own monopoly upon legitimate symbolic violence." As Lasch wrote in a memorable summation, this was a generation that "tended to confuse intellectual values with the interests of intellectuals as a class, just as they confused freedom with the national interests of the United States.""79

It may be somewhat tendentious to put it so sharply, but if the proto- typical, liberal anti-communist during the cold war was, as Lasch put it, "a disillusioned ex-communist, obsessed by the corruption of Western politics and culture, by the pervasive influence of Stalinism and driven by a need to exercise the evil and expiate his own past"80; at least one prominent critique of multiculturalism has been articulated by the disillusioned, ex-New Leftist, obsessed by the corruption of American politics and culture by the pervasive influence of "identity politics," and driven by a need to exercise the evil and expiate his anti-imperial past. What is ironic, of course, is that the critique of multiculturalism is often couched in the same language used (by Lasch and others) to critique



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the state/intellectuals of the cold war period in the first place. Indeed, Lasch himself, at the end of his life, became a champion of exactly the sort of "left populism" that Kazin recommends.81 Still, the paradigmatic themes of national betrayal, rhetorical violence, personal irratio- nality, and even the fear of political death, animating the discourse of cold war intellectuals, are very much alive in the panic about multiculturalism.82 The links across generations become even clearer when we consider that many of the principle theoreticians and intellectuals associated with cold war liberalism have also been at the center of the attacks on multiculturalism, and especially the so-called "turn to race" since the late 1960s. This group includes among others, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and even Woodward himself. It was Woodward who, as early as 1969, in an address to the Organization of American Historians (OAH), wondered whether the temptations of black nationalism were beginning to "substitute a new racism for an old."83

Despite some overt differences, what is fascinating about these two intellectual formations is the deeper symmetry-their convergence around issues of race, class, and nation-the very terms whose relationships were mystified within cold war discourse. Indeed, it is ironic, to say the least, that the reassessment of the populist dream of a producer's republic comes at the moment of the accelerated transnationalization of capital and the lowest rates of unionization of American workers since the New Deal, a period when a nationally- organized, materially empowered, insurgency of the "producers" may be more remote than at any other time in U.S. history. I would suggest that what we really need to do is to turn the question of "populism" on its head and analyze the key terms that are subordinated within this discourse, namely race and class. If Kazin's argument is correct and populism is essentially a rhetorical code that can be claimed by either a left or a right, and one in which the people are in effect an imaginary referent---defined against an equally imaginary other-then populism does actually have a particular elective affinity with racism. However, insofar as the production of the boundaries of the imagined community of the nation is concerned, racism has been a much more enduring and effective discourse in U.S. history than populism, and one that has (especially since the Jackson era) been mobilized in the name of the state." In fact, this is one of the reasons why every instance of American populism has foundered at precisely the point at which it has




tried to imagine the incorporation of black people into "we, the people." It is Kazin's very admission of this fact that gives the lie to his assertion that there was no such thing as conservative populism before 1940. Moreover, he consistently upholds this as a constitutive feature of populism, when he insists that left-wing populism, including his own intellectualized version, can only succeed by ignoring or neutralizing "race" and clinging to some form of color-blind language.

If we consider the history of American racism and the responses to it as seriously as we consider the history of American populism, then the cold war liberal consensus of the 1950s and 1960s has an even more striking and insidious resemblance with the current one. If anything, cold war liberals at the beginning of the Second Reconstruction were more insistent upon "color-blind" language, and the subordination of racial questions to national ones, than their populist predecessors in the CIO and the Popular Front. By contrast, the active proponents of multicultural democracy in America today (like Cornel West, Manning Marable or Jesse Jackson, for example), far from abandoning the left- wing populism of the 1930s and early 1940s, have actually attempted to revivify its left-wing, pluralist legacy.85 It is arguable that such a left, pluralist vision animates the recent efforts from within the AFL-CIO (long crippled by its own adherence to cold war liberalism) to reconstruct its rank-and-file base by making inroads into a heretofore largely disorganized multilingual, multinational labor force both within and beyond the immediate borders of the United States.

This is where the failure of contemporary historians and critics to recognize the importance of the transformation of the U.S. racial formation beginning in the early 1940s has had its greatest consequences. Under the rubric of the cold war and anti-communism, the American universalism of an Adamic, or a McWilliams, was actually translated into a decidedly less pluralizing and less democratic conceptualization of American nationalism than the one that had emerged within the ambit of the CIO and the Popular Front. What was emphasized instead was the functionalist argument that racism was something that needed to be eradicated because it had begun to limit both the internal and international potentialities of the United States in the struggle with communism, and in the attempt to hegemonize the Third World. As self-conscious modernizers, moreover, cold war intellectuals could not imagine that their own practice might be tainted by racism. They thus argued strenuously that "racial" and "ethnic"



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differences were withering away in America, and elevated notions of color-blind universalism as the first principle of American nationalism.

The current reassessment of populism, with its disdain for political correctness and its critique of multiculturalism as a code for contemporary race-thinking, is motivated by this same, hopeful appeal to color- blind nationalism, only this time, the enemies are not populist dema- gogues, but rhetorically violent black militants, and other multicultural villains. What has happened in the course of this transition is a historical shift of allegiance and emphasis within an ideological matrix of race and class that has been central to every hegemonic constellation of social forces throughout the history of the United States. The shift in emphasis is precisely marked by the tendency toward a mutually exclusive appeal to either "race" or "class," as opposed to seeing the ways in which these appeals are consistently articulated together in a national society structured by both racial hierarchy and class division.86 Thus, it is not that we have passed, as Sean Wilentz argues in his review of Kazin's book, into a liberal order "more interested in minorities than any popular majority," but rather that we continue to exist in a liberal order in which both racist and ostensibly anti-racist arguments are defined by a boundary of class-belonging, and where class-conscious arguments are in turn defined and limited by the boundary of race.87 In this sense, it is also true that although the cold war may have been "won," it never actually ended.

III. Toward the Reconstruction of Universalism

It is a savage irony that capitalist states have again and again succeeded in mobilising patriotic feelings in their own forms and interests. The artificiali- ties of modern nationalism and patriotism, in states of this kind, have then to be referred not to some intellectually dissolving universality, but to the precise and powerful functions which, necessarily in the form of artifice, they are now required to perform.

-Raymond Williams, The Year 2000 (1983)

My own country I lament is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.

-Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967)

It is perhaps not widely known that when Martin Luther King announced his opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967, he was vilified




from every quarter of the official U.S. public sphere. Although King's unpopular stand against the war was ultimately overshadowed by his assassination and subsequent martyrdom, the ferocious campaign against him, by the police, in the press, in Congress, and among entrenched civil rights leaders, indicates that King himself was not above having a serious fall from grace. As he said in his last published speeches, people accused him of betrayal and wrongheadedness, saying "peace and civil rights don't mix.""88 It is disquieting (to say the least) that the man who had been charged with the heady task of saving the soul of America, could be so readily cast beyond the borders of acceptable discourse. King claimed to "speak as a citizen of the world," and "as an American," identifying an integral connection between America's extension of colonial warfare in Vietnam and the failure to achieve racial justice and social amelioration at home.89 Yet, by making such a connection, he was put beyond the pale, viewed as traitorous, and in effect deemed un-American.

It is interesting and not the least bit incidental that King's last public speeches were widely aired not in the United States, but in Canada, by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. King began by arguing that "over and above any kinship of United States citizens and Canadians as North Americans there is a singular historical relationship between American Negroes and Canada." "Canada is not merely a neighbor to Negroes," King said, "in our struggle for freedom Canada was the North Star."9 What is most fascinating is the way King's phrasing actually cleaves apart the unifying term-United States citizens-in recalling that "Negroes" have had a separate existence within, and a tortured relationship to, this particular national context. It is this singular history, moreover, that opens up the possibility and perhaps even the necessity of other sorts of allegiances and affiliations. In fact, King's own experience now seemed to bear this out.

Today there is no other figure who more clearly defines and embodies the notion of African-American equality as a national imperative than Martin Luther King, Jr. There is much to be said about the many ways that King's rhetoric strategically and successfully tied the fortunes of "the Negro" to the status of the nation-state as a whole (especially in the period prior to his statements about Vietnam). First of all, King argued the urgency of civil rights as a matter of national redemption and moral regeneration, or in the recognizable idiom



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Sacvan Bercovitch defines as the "American jeremaid."9' More specifically, in his speech during the 1963 March on Washington, King's extended metaphorical claim to be presenting "a check" at "the bank of justice," one that had been repeatedly returned "stamped insufficient funds" where black people were concerned, defined the fulfillment of black aspirations in the United States as a litmus test for the "affluent society" itself. This is the King who is officially remembered and cherished today, exemplified by the fact that he is commemorated with a national holiday-the only African American who has been monu- mentalized in this way for the nation. Yet, this is also the King, who as a consequence, has become a part of a mythic nationalist discourse that claims the bold, anti-racist imperatives he articulated as its own, even as it obscures what were, in the end, his significantly more complex, worldly and radical politics.

I will not address here the counter-historical question of what might have happened to King had he lived, whether his stature would have ultimately increased with the burgeoning peace movement, or whether he would have descended into a certain obscurity (like W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Paul Robeson during the cold war), with reputation and credibility effectively destroyed by the myriad cam- paigns against him. The outcry against him for his comments on the Vietnam War (including the calls for his exile and ostracism), is something that I view as paradigmatic, and therefore as a provocation to engage with one of the most compelling arguments for going "beyond multiculturalism" in politics and education today: David Hollinger's call for a "post-ethnic" America.92 Hollinger calls upon adversaries in the culture wars to unite by renewing an American universalism that at once affirms the cosmopolitan impulses of multicultural worldliness and diversity rhetoric, while at the same time critiquing the equally prominent multicultural emphasis upon "ethno- racial enclosures" and cultural insiderism (3). Perhaps because he approached, but did not attain (at least in his life) exilic status--citizen of the world-it is King who is held up today (by Hollinger and others) as a symbol of the most unassailable version of American universalism, the best representative of the dream of transcending the racial fault lines that were opened by identitarian militants and separatists during the late 1960s, and now routinely exacerbated by the culture wars. What was most remarkable about King, Hollinger writes, is that he led




a movement of the excluded that also "widened the circle of the we .... affirming a national American we and the solidarity of black people at the same time" (171).

Hollinger argues that the pluralist emphasis within multiculturalism misrecognizes something fundamental about the history of the United States, namely the tradition of civic nationalism derived from the U.S. and French revolutions. Hollinger distinguishes civic nationalism from various kinds of ethnic nationalism rife in the war-torn world. "The civic nation," he writes, is located midway, so to speak, between the ethnos and the species." And, the United States is in most respects, the world's exemplary civic nation (138). As Hollinger writes,

[T]he "we" that corresponds to American citizenship-mediates more di- rectly than most other national communities do between the species and those varieties of humankind defined in terms of ethno-racial affiliations. A "Chinese ethnic" can, of course, be a citizen of France or of Great Britain, or even of Israel or Japan, but I hope it is fair to observe that in all these cases, he or she will encounter a national community with a manifestly more ethnocentric social history and public culture than that of the contemporary United States. Moreover, when this "Chinese ethnic," or a "white southerner," or any other American rooted in any one, particular enclave within the United States manages to identify with the American people as a whole, that American takes a tiny but ideologically significant step toward fraternal solidarity with the species. 93

Although Hollinger cautions against embracing the notion that "we are the world," in the current context it would be difficult to find a more extravagant defense of the universalist propensities of "American civilization" than his.94 In other words, it is not any nationalism Hollinger is promoting, but rather good nationalism, or a nationalism oriented toward universalism. Ethnic nationalism, or bad nationalism, differs from good, civic nationalism, in its willful promotion of primordial attachments as the basis for national belonging. Civic nations, by contrast, are at least theoretically open to anyone, though Hollinger does acknowledge (echoing Myrdal) that the United States, while adhering to a non-ethnic theory of the nation, has engaged in continu- ous, though inconsistent, practices of discrimination and exclusion.

What is most brilliant about Hollinger's account is that it effectively (re)presents the organic, ideological form that American national subjectivity has assumed during our epoch-namely the argument that America is universal-for our own more sceptical, multicultural times.



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In order to do so, Hollinger advances the familiar argument that multicultural concerns with radically particularist and radically universalist projects have conceded the functional universality of American nationalism and the state-form to the forces of the far right. This is especially problematic in his view, in a context in which globalization threatens to erode structures and principles of democratic accountabil- ity between the nation, (or "the people"), and the state. This situation for Hollinger has been badly exacerbated both by multiculturalists who reject national consciousness, but look toward state entitlements, and by a transnational business elite that essentially does the same thing. It is precisely at this nexus of the "state" and the "nation," however, that Hollinger's own careful distinctions begin to break down. The worst aspect of multiculturalism, Hollinger writes, is that it "discredits as nationalist. . . . efforts to identify cultural adhesives that enable Americans to feel a sense of peoplehood while continuing to recognize their diversity" (157). More honest than many critics of multiculturalism, Hollinger acknowledges that his positive valuation of the Whitmanesque idea of "cultural adhesives" actually means that the distinction between civic and ethnic nations becomes less fixed. "If all solidarities are ultimately constructs, and not primordial," he writes,

It will not do to pronounce as artificial the cultural continuities that have developed in relation to the American nation-state, and to then take at face value claims to authenticity made on behalf of other cultures. Indeed, the distinction between civic and ethnic eventually breaks down because over the course of time civic affiliations can help to create those that are eventually recognized as ethnic. (160)

Etienne Balibar theorizes the process of creating such cultural continuities as constituting what is in effect the "fictive ethnicity" of the nation, and further suggests that this is one of the reasons why even civic nationalism has been paradoxical in its universalism, or why racism has consistently emerged as the supplement of nationalism.95 Civic nationalisms, in other words, are not simply liberatory, they also constitute what Hollinger calls a "culture," and found a "state." This is the point at which a process of subjective normalization occurs, and when the tracing of a nationalist lineage becomes paramount. In other words, it will not do to separate nationalism into Hegelian and Herderian--civic and ethnic-strands. When talking about nationalism, we must simultaneously talk about the emancipation of the




individual as an abstract, citizen-subject, at the same time as we acknowledge the process by which a "substantial collective identity" is created by on-going "functioning of hegemonic institutions" (that is, a state), operating in the name of, while at the same time (retroactively) constituting, "the people."96

Thus, even if Hollinger says that civic nations like the United States "mediate between a particular ethnos and the species," this mediation is decidedly unstable and is consistently dividing into "good" and "bad" "theory" and "practice," "nationalism" and "racism," "peace" and "war," "universalism" and "particularism," "the nation" and "the state," the list of antinomies goes on and on. The problem is that the concept of universalism in this discussion remains too closely aligned with the idea of nationalism and especially with the achievement of a hegemonic social formation capable of transcending differences, social antagonisms, and divisions. The modem nation-state and its structures of citizenship, in this sense, are the exemplary forms what Balibar calls "fictitious universalism," or the universalism appropriate to those domains encompassing "effective processes of institutions and representations. . . . [that] liberate individual subjectivity from narrow communitarian bonds, and at the same time impose normal, that is, normative and normalized patterns of individual behavior."97

Indeed, as Marx recognized in his earliest writings, the fictitious universalism of the nation-state has been primarily been asserted in relation to the problem of class division. In other words, the political community of the modern civic nation is imagined, first and foremost, as something can take precedence over substantive, economic inequalities.98 At the same time, the so-called civic nations have also formed against one and other as a dominant "core" within a world-system, in which conquest, forced labor and colonization have been central to a history of nationalizing, these heterogeneous, social territories. These nations, in other words, have formed precisely the kind of collective self-identity, in which the historical schemas of race have been put to a consistent and generous usages in producing both a concept of the people and the identity of a state. In this sense, the appeal of nationalism and patriotism is always more than the universalizing abstraction of republican citizenship and civic equality; it is actually addressed to someone in particular, marking the paradoxical movement of modern, civic nationalism toward a categorical universality, on the one hand, and a resolute affirmation of its own particularity, on the



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other." This is finally why racialization (or ethnicization), has been so persistent within the nationalization of social formations, as it has helped to define both the limit and the condition of a normalized condition of national belonging. What is paradoxical is the fact that "racism" also always threatens to undo a state of national belonging, since modem, civic nations have been explicitly defined in universalist terms, or precisely by relativizing and subordinating differences in the name of a national abstraction. Hollinger's attempt to simply align civic nationalism with universalism (as he himself implicitly recognizes) cannot account for the contradictory politics of nationalist identification (or the contradictory identity politics of nationalism), as it interweaves and combines these distinct impulses.

What is most exemplary about the history of the U.S. nation-form is that it has been both exclusionary and integrationist in such obvious ways-as exemplified in the ambiguous desire articulated first by Crevecour, and re-iterated recently by Schlesinger to found "a new race of men. .... an American race."'" At least in this sense, I have to agree with Hollinger: the United States has operated in the way in which every successful nation-state would want to, not by erasing differences, but by relativizing some differences and categorizing others, so that "the difference between ourselves and foreigners is the one that is lived as absolute and irreducible."'0' At the same time-and this is important-the universality of the "state" founded by the "nation" has been predicated upon dividing practices that retroactively produce "the people" (over and over again) in specific cultural terms. This has consistently been accomplished through the externalization of difference, one reason why Randolph Bourne's maxim, "war is the health of the state," remains so entirely apt. At the same time, it is clear that differences have remained, at least in a latent sense, internalized within the national formation itself, at which point the state has been called upon to manage forms of inequality through strategies of both normalization (hegemony) and internal exclusion (repression). The epistemic, historical, moral, and worldly political status of internalized/externalized exclusion and inequality, perpetuated by the civic nation, constitutes the proper, if vexed, terrain of the culture wars. In this conflictual, communal conversation, the reassertion of American universalism actually provides few solutions; it only begs more questions.

Perhaps now we can see why Martin Luther King, Jr. is such a paradigmatic figure. We might say that King embraced the fictive




universalism of the American nation-state-its legal, ethical and cultural values-as presenting the possibility for emancipation. Certainly, Hollinger is right that during the post-World War II era, there is no better proof of the enduring validity of American universalism than the idea that dominated or excluded groups would "struggle against discrimination or inequality in the very name of the superior values of the community."'02 Yet, in addition to enduring almost a decade of surveillance and persecution by the EB.I., when King spoke out against the war (something Hollinger does not acknowledge), he was quickly aligned with what is now widely viewed as the anti-American left. As people told him "peace and civil rights don't mix." The borders of acceptable discourse were the borders of the country itself-a country that was also a state fighting an imperialist war in the name of anti- communism. Paradoxically then, King also became a victim of the very American universalism he championed, an American universalism sealed by the "cultural adhesives" provided by America's supranational identification as the "Free World," "the West," and an ideal humanity, in which the cultural and political legacies of empire had been recoded by other names.

The argument that I have presented that anti-communism was the modus operandi for a political project in which a racial animus and an imperial ambition remained paramount, if sublated, is not beyond dispute. Nonetheless, it is more than a little ironic in my view, that the rationale of defending freedom against slavery, so crucial to fighting cold and hot wars in American life, was also the basis for silencing the greatest twentieth-century voices to have spoken on behalf of the children and grandchildren of America's slaves, King and Du Bois. Perhaps the greatest limitation of Hollinger's account of American universalism is that it risks confusing a sociological description of the American national social state's public tolerance of diversity with the ideological status of universalism itself. This has two principle effects: (1) it threatens to close down the possibility that a discussion of universality as an ideal or a symbol might involve a plurality of projections and interpretations-capitalism, socialism, anti-colonialism, religious redemption, even multiculturalism-in other words, it might require political choices and conflicts; and 2) it fundamentally obscures the real universality of our planetary existence, thus inhibiting our imagination of the world-system as the necessary horizon of social transformation and political emancipation.03



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For these and many other reasons, I have proposed that we begin to rethink arguments about multiculturalism and universalism through a historicist lense, and specifically as they have been mobilized in relation to the geopolitical pressures exerted during the period of America's accession to world leadership. What is most frequently targeted as the precursor of multicultural dissensus in this country today, namely the radicalization of the civil rights movement and the alliance of the student-led New Left and black power movements, was actually a more purposive and pointed affair and part of a much more complex legacy. In the first place, 1960s radicalism was built from the outset upon a fundamental contestation of the cold war settlement that portrayed racism and colonialism as atavisms that were disappearing in the face of an enlightened American nationalism and internationalism.'" In fact, these movements urgently opened up the question of the relationship between the persistence and entrenchment of racism at home and emergence of the United States as a new kind of imperialist power within the world-system-a project uniquely threatening to the forces of order. No one exemplifies this better than King, who scandalized the nation with his now perhaps forgotten prophecy that "the promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam," the year before he was himself shot down.

By the early 1970s, scholars and pundits closely associated with official orthodoxy and the state's interest recognized the meaning of 1968 in similar terms, arguing that a crisis in the "governability of democracies" had been engendered by the simultaneous emergence of newly assertive groups within the domestic realm and eruptions within the established cold war framework for managing international relations. Zbignew Brezinski warned in the early 1970s that "new aspirations of the Third and Fourth worlds united together," had superseded the cold war and become "the major threat to the international system and ultimately to our own society."'05 At the same time, Samuel Huntington, Professor of Government at Harvard, described the domestic side of the threat to American hegemony as the "activation of formerly passive and marginalized groups" within the United States. "Blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women," Huntington foreboded, "have embarked on concerted efforts to establish their claims to opportunities, positions, rewards and privileges, which they had not considered themselves entitled [sic] before."'"

The "reassertion of democratic egalitarianism" in the 1960s, as




Huntington termed it in his report to the Trilateral Commission, was hardly a welcome development. With the fundamental term democracy radicalized and freed from its cold war captivity, Huntington conceded, in what is now a famous revelation, that there was actually an "excess of democracy" at home and around the world. Bringing the post-World War II dialectic of intranational division and supranational ambition first articulated by McWilliams full-circle, he worried,

For a quarter-century the United States was the hegemonic power in a system of world order. The manifestations of the democratic distemper, however, have already stimulated uncertainty among allies and could well stimulate adventurism among enemies. ... A decline in the govemability of democracy at home means a decline in the influence of democracy abroad.'07

Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan were more specific in identifying the principal source of alarm, pointing out that America's "black movement had as surprising a resonance abroad as at home," and that movements modeled on the idioms of black power had emerged in the West Indies, Israel, Northern Ireland and Quebec.8os Glazer and Moynihan were as eager to redefine the domestic meaning of "black power" in terms of Richard Nixon's promotion of "black capitalism," and the model of immigrant striving and ethnic succession, as they were concerned to short-circuit its international appeal.

Indeed, rather than destroying the left and progressive imaginary, I would suggest that the crisis of late 1960s witnessed the re-emergence of the powerful tradition of black worldliness submerged during the cold war. As C. L. R. James wrote in 1970, upon returning to the United States for the first time since his own deportation in 1952, black people in the United States were recognizing "the opportunities that history placed in their hands, not only in regard to the advancement of their own situation, but in regard to the ideas and activities of oppressed people the world over."'" As much as we might scrutinize the many failures of this form of liberation politics, its relationship to the multiculturalist disposition should be fairly clear at this point. And, as my brief summary of the official view suggests, the presumption that American nationhood is an unproblematic horizon of thought and the only meaningful framework for responsible political theory and practice, limits our understanding of these determinate political struggles of our time. It is not an accident that the culture wars today continue to turn upon questions of race and empire. The elision of these terms, successfully accomplished by the cold war, and perpetuated in most



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critiques of multiculturalism provide us with no safe passage to the universal.

An irony of the current period is that whatever happens in the name of multiculturalism, very little of it seems to alter the career trajectories of the most notable state intellectuals of our era, whose lock-step march with power continues to assume whatever political languages are most convenient at the moment. Recent works by liberal and conservative writers with geo-policy ambitions, including Huntington and Moynihan, have done a great deal to confirm my sense that the ultimate stakes of the culture wars concern U.S. world-ordering ambitions and projects."0 In different ways, these writers now offer interpretations of the contemporary world, in which a putatively multiculturalist hermeneutic asserting the primacy, irreducibility and plurality of ethno-cultural differences, is transvalued in a global realist account of Hobbesian disorder, civilizational decline, and threats to the supranational identity of "the West." In these social science fictions, "the post-Cold war world" is defined, as Huntington puts it, as a world in which

the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural . . . tribal ..., ethnic ..., religious .... nation[al] ..., and at the broadest level civilization[al]."'

It is perhaps in the face of such conclusions by erstwhile comrades that Nathan Glazer, a longtime defender of universal mandates in U.S. foreign and domestic policy, concludes somewhat wearily that "we are all multiculturalists now." Far from being the scourge of American first principles, it would seem that a conception of culture wars, writ large, is steadily providing the intellectual grounds upon which future U.S. worldly settlements will be imagined!

Yet, these particular works deploy multicultural heuristics, precisely to recommend that multicultural phenomena be externalized to the extant borders or boundaries of given national and "civilizational" entities. Thus, Huntington writes that in a "multipolar," "multicivilizational" world,

the survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique, not universal. Avoidance of a global war of civilizations depends upon world leaders accepting and cooperating to maintain the multicivilizational character of global politics (20).




In other words, global multiculturalism might be the antidote to global war. Multiculturalism at home, however, portends "an internal clash of civilizations within the United States" that threatens the "de-Western- ization," the degeneration, and perhaps even the existence of the United States as a politico-cultural "identity" (190). This argument is distinc- tive in that it stresses the final incommensurability of populations beyond the "core" Euroamerican states and draws upon the cartographies and languages of empire ("the West and the rest," as Huntington puts it)-and not the languages of universalism-as the appropriate response to multicultural drift and disorder at home, and in the world. Rather than amplifying the anti-universalism of multiculturalism, Huntington's argument, the self-conscious "successor to the three worlds of the cold war," ironically reopens a set of questions repressed by the more decided "universalism" of the cold war national security state, namely the U.S. imbrication within, and extension of, the cultures and politics of imperialism (187).

In closing, I want to suggest that it will not be possible to arrive at entirely multiculturalist, or entirely universalist answers to our current predicament. Rather, it is worth understanding the uses to which these concepts are put within the various fields of symbolic power we inhabit. In this paper, I have attempted to outline some of the ways in which reflections upon internal divisions and differences within the United States have been integrally tied to efforts to rethink the U.S. being-in-the-world. Returning to the 1940s and the cold war, I have also attempted to show some of the nuanced accents given to fundamental and universal concepts such as democracy and nationhood. In doing so, I have combined a hermeneutics of suspicion about what I regard as historically determinate claims to universality, along with a sense that universalism is absolutely indispensable as an ideal and symbol. By proposing the reconstruction of universalism, finally, I hope to counter the distressing argument that the continued emphasis upon race and race-thinking, is the real obstacle to building for a just society in the United States. Indeed, it might be worth pondering the paradox that what I call black worldliness, the counter-tradition of America's most marked exclusion, is perhaps this country's only consistent universalism. As an emancipatory form, the modern civic nation (that is, civilization) is riven by the contradictions of race and class, something that processes of capitalist globalization and post- colonial labor migrations have made more, not less, apparent. If it is



RECODING EMPIRE 515

indeed an emancipatory discourse, American universalism must face these, its worldly shadows.

NOTES

Portions of this paper were presented at the "Arts of Democracy" Conference at the Wilson Center in April of 1997, and at the AHA in Seattle in January 1998. I am grateful to Casey Blake, Herman Lebovics, Susan Nugent, Penny Von Eschen, Tim Borstelmann, William Chafe, Michael Hogan, and the other conference participants for those occasions. I am indebted everyone who read and commented on versions of this essay, including David Hollinger, Michael Denning, Nancy Cott, Hazel Carby, Alys Weinbaum, Brent Edwards, David Kazanjian, Adam Green, Matt Jacobson, Abdul Mustapha, Andrew Schroeder and Sujani Reddy. I thank Lucy Maddox, Terry Murphy, and the anonymous reviewers from the American Quarterly for their supportive criticisms. Finally, I want to acknowledge the graduate students at NYU from my "American Studies and the Long Twentieth Century" seminars for untold contributions to these reflections.

1. Nathan Glazer, We are All Multiculturalists Now, (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 4; John Higham, "Multiculturualism and Universalism: a History and Critique," Ameri- can Quarterly 44 (winter 1992); Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York, 1995); Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York, 1992).

2. David Hollinger, PostEthnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 1995); Arther Meltzer, Jerry Weinberger and Richard Zinman eds., Multiculturalism and American Democracy (Lawrence, Kans., 1998).

3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Teaching for the Times," in The Decolonization of the Imagination, ed., Jan Nederveen Pieterse, (London, 1995), 177-202; Andrew Ross, Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice (New York, 1998).

4. Bruce Cummings, "Global Realm With No Limit, Global Realm With No Name," Radical History Review 57 (spring 1993): 47.

5. Cedric Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York, 1997), 129. 6. Philip Foner and Ronald Lewis, eds., The Black Worker A Documentary History

from Colonial Times to the Present, vol. VI, (New York, 1983), 674; Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America (Jackson, MI, 1991); Harvard Sitkoff, The Black Struggle for Equality (New York, 1993); Jules Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York, 1993).

7. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s (New York, 1986).

8. The best works that evince this tendency include Melvin Leffler's magisterial A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War (Stanford, Calif., 1992); Melvyn Leffler and David Painter, eds., The Origins of the Cold War: An International History; Thomas McCormick, America's Half Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War (Baltimore, Md., 1989). Important recent correctives that explicitly link internal racial matters with questions of foreign policy are Mary Dudziak, "Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative," Stanford




Law Review 41 (September 1994); Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: African Americans and Anti-Colonial Politics, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997); and Brenda Gayle Plummer, A Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935- 1960 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996).

9. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (New York, 1988); Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 1984).

10. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion (New York, 1994); Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); and Gitlin, Twilight, 67-71. Gitlin recognizes the immense significance of the Vietnam War for, as he puts it, tearing at "the seams" of American identity. Yet, like so many contemporary pundits he retreats into a kind of insularity and confuses cause and effect, when he sees the latter as the primary catastrophe of the period and blames the anti-war movement and racial insurgents for "ceding" patriotic symbols of a "common America" to the right. He thus no longer weighs the appalling national and international consequences of this episode of immoral, politically unaccountable U.S. state violence. For an extended version of this argument see Nikhil Pal Singh, "The Black Panthers and the Undeveloped Country of the Left," in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, ed. Charles Jones (Baltimore, Md., 1998): 57-105.

11. The notion of competing universalisms developed in the first section of the essay was stimulated by Etienne Balibar who suggests that we need to re-think universalism as an equivocal, rather than a univocal concept. To that end, he distinguishes between three forms, or modalities of universalism: 1) fictitious universalism, which is the universality claimed by social institutions and representations, what he calls "social hegemonies" (57); 2) ideal universalism, which is the universalism of the utopian and emancipatory demand, or "the introduction of the unconditional into the realm of politics" (65); and 3) real universalism, or the universality of the world-system itself as an interconnected whole. See Etienne Balibar, "Ambiguous Universalism," Differences (spring 1995): 47-74.

12. Louis Adamic, "The Crisis is Our Opportunity," Common Ground (autumn 1940): 71. Michael Denning shows how reflections on "race" and "culture" in the broadest sense of these terms-complex, compound referents marking the formations of communities of people-were at the center of Popular Front social and cultural theory. The discussion that follows is heavily indebted to Denning's work. See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture (New York, 1997), 445.

13. Carey McWilliams, Brothers Under the Skin (Boston, Mass., 1943), 4. Further page references to this work are cited parenthetically within the text.

14. Philip Gleason, Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in 20th Century America (New York, 1992), 59; Higham, "Multiculturalism and Universalism," 197.

15. See for example Werner Sollors influential book Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York, 1986).

16. Carey McWilliams, "The Civil Rights Report," Common Ground 1 (autumn 1948); Richard Walsh, "For Equality in Naturalization," Common Ground 4 (summer 1947).

17. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton, N.J., 1989), xxi.

18. Denning, The Cultural Front, 467. 19. Oliver Cromwell Cox, "Modern Democracy and Class Struggle" (1947), in Race,

Class and the World System, ed. Herbert M. Hunter and Sameer Y. Abraham (New



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York, 1987), 200-221; Also see Nikhil Pal Singh, Color and Democracy in the American Century (Cambridge, Mass., forthcoming).

20. This is clearer in the following lines from Adamic celebrating intranational differences within the context of an American nationalist and exceptionalist claim to universality: "The fact that [our] population is an extension of most of the Old World, stemming from about sixty different backgrounds, constitutes perhaps one of the greatest advantages which the U.S. enjoys. Our cultural and spiritual materials and powers are enormous, potential well-nigh beyond calculation, and we have an opportunity to create. . . . a great culture on this continent; a culture which will approach being universal or pan-human and more satisfying to the inner human make- up than any culture that has as yet appeared on this earth." Adamic, "The Crisis," 67. Also see Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s, (New Haven, Conn., 1996), 51-2.

21. Adamic, 'The Crisis," 67. 22. Henry Luce, The American Century (New York, 1941), 23. Further page

references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. 23. Norman Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People's Century (New York,

1973), 50. 24. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Public Papers and Addresses of F.D.R., vo. XI (New

York, 1942), 353. Also see Charles Beard and Mary Beard, The American Spirit: The Rise of American Civilization, vol. IV (New York, 1948), 570.

25. Ibid., 416. 26. David Hollinger, "How Wide the Circle of the "We"? American Intellectuals and

the problem of the Ethnos since World War II," American Historical Review 57 (spring 1993): 318. I am not of course suggesting that the FEPC was ever given any teeth by the Roosevelt Administration.

27. Henry Wallace, "The Price of Free World Victory (1942)," in Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), 193. Further page references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text.

28. Dwight MacDonald, Henry Wallace: The Man and the Myth (New York, 1947), 31-2.

29. Indeed if Wallace's vision was "ideal," evoking the insurrectionary demand of the disenfranchised, it might make sense to introduce the term realism to describe Luce's prefigurative relationship to what would eventually become a dominant U.S. discourse for mapping worldly relations during the cold war. Exponents of realism like Reinhold Niehbur, for example, called upon one world visionaries to be less universalist and more culturally specific in identifying the potential agents and members of a world civilization. See Reinhold Neihbur, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkeness (New York, 1945); David Noble, The End of American History: Democ- racy, Capitalism and the Metaphor of Two Worlds in Anglo-American Historical Writing, 1880-1980 (Minneapolis, MN, 1985); John Ehrmann, Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1994 (New Haven, Conn., 1995).

30. Editorial Comment, Negro Quarterly, 1 (winter/spring 1943): ii-iii. 31. Editorial Comment, Negro Quarterly, 3 (fall 1942): 196 (emphasis added). 32. Roi Ottley, A New World-A-Coming (New York, 1943), 344. The notion of the

black popular front is developed by Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, 19. 33. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Human Rights for All Minorities (1945)," in W. E. B. Du

Bois Speaks, vol.2, ed. Philip Foner (New York, 1970), 184. Further page references to this work are cited parenthetically within the text.

34. W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa (New York, 1946).




35. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Negro and Imperialism (1944)," in W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks, vol.2, ed. Philip Foner (New York, 1970), 155. Also see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York 1967), 267).

36. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Souls of Whitefolk," Darkwater: Voices Within the Veil (New York, 1920), 49.

37. W. E. B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: The Colonies and The Peace (New York, 1945), 91.

38. Ibid., 71. 39. Ottley, A New World, 5 (emphasis added). 40. Robert Hill, ed., The F.B.I.'s RACON: Racial Conditions in the United States

during World War II (New York, 1995); Patrick Washburn, A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government's Investigation of the Black Press During World War II (New York, 1986); Kenneth O'Reilly, Black Americans: The F.B.I. Files (New York, 1984).

41. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 2 Volumes (1944), (New York, 1962). Further page references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text.

42. Michael Wala, The Council on Foreign Relations and the Early Cold War (Oxford, 1994); David Southern, Gunnar Myrdal and Black White Relations: The Use and Abuse of an American Dilemma (Baton Rouge, LA, 1984); Walter Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990).

43. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "The Liberal Fifth Column in America," Partisan Review (summer 1946): 279-93; Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal, 320-22.

44. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London, 1983), 3; Von Eschen, Race Against Empire.

45. Ralph Ellison, "The Negro and the Second World War," in Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man ed. Eric Sundquist (New York, 1995), 236.

46. Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars (New York, 1992), 2. 47. William Peitz, "The Postcolonialism of Cold War Discourse," Social Text 21

(1987): 66. 48. L.S. Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age (New York, 1981),

459. Also see James Blaut, The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory of Nationalism (London, 1987).

49. On this point see Amy Kaplan's important essay, "Left Alone With America," Cultures of U.S. Imperialism (Durham, N.C., 1993), 14. For the economic interests undergirding America's post-World War II imperium see McCormick, America's Half Century.

50. Kennan quoted in Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anti- Communism and the Making of America (New York, 1994), 58.

51. Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion, 22. 52. St.Clair Drake, "The International Implications of Race Relations," Journal of

Negro Education (1951): 269. 53. Plummer, Rising Wind; 189-204; Also see Gerald Home, Black and Red: W. E.

B. Du Bois and the Afro- American Response to the Cold War (Albany, N.Y., 1986); and Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York, 1989).

54. Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion, 21. 55. See for example Harold Isaacs, The New World of American Negroes (London,

1963), 7. 56. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1966), 135. 57. Ibid., 134. 58. John Herbert Roper, C. Vann Woodward: Southerner (Athens, Ga., 1983), 129.



RECODING EMPIRE 519

59. C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York, 1938). Also see Woodward, Strange Career, 73; Roper, C. Vann Woodward, 174.

60. This is much closer to the argument of Woodward's earlier work, The Origins of the New South (New York, 1951). For elaborations of this argument see John Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the U.S. South (New York, 1982); and Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (New York, 1997). Lichtenstein notes that both sides of the controversy started by Woodward's Origins about the character of the New South: continuity vs. change, agrarian vs. bourgeois, planter vs. industrial hegemony; assume "modernization" and "development" are forces that sweep away forms of racial exclusion, in particular unfree labor. Lichtenstein shows how this faulty construction (common to both liberal and certain orthodox Marxist arguments) fails to recognize the extent to which racialized power has been integral to shaping a particular kind of modernization and industrial development- including the persistence of unfree labor-in the twentieth century South (10).

61. This important argument is advanced by David Roediger, Toward the Abolition of Whiteness (New York, 1996): 52.

62. Ibid., 51. 63. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York, 1935), 30. 64. Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life (New York, 1950), 148.

Further page references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. 65. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious

Sociology (Chicago, 1983), 38. Futher page references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text.

66. Will Herberg, "Marxism and the Negro," in Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison 's Invisible Man, 199-205.

67. It is also important to note how this reasoning recodes racial exclusion as black pathology. The latter, in the words of Moynihan "is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world," thereby justifying his famous policy proposal of "benign neglect." Moynihan is quoted in Steven Steinberg, Turning Back: the Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston, Mass., 1995), 5.

68. For example, explanations for Nazi fascism underwent a similar revision during this period as they were relocated from a political and social analysis of the dynamics of European modernity and state-formation into explorations of psychopathological "personality types." Theodore Adorno, et.al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950).

69. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion (New York, 1994), 190. 70. Peter Steinfels, The Neo-Conservatives: The Men Who are Changing America's

Politics (New York, 1979), 31; Also see Kovel, "Red-Hunting," 50, 143. 71. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 193. Further page references to this work are

cited parenthetically in the text. 72. Works in this genre depart from Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican

Majority (New York, 1970). Also see Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics (New York, 1991); Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers (New York, 1988); and previously cited works by Fraser and Gerstle, Gitlin and Rorty. Also see Singh, "The Black Panthers," 58-60.

73. Hegemony is given its precise meaning by Antonio Gramsci to designate a particular constellation of ruling-interests at a given historical moment. Gramsci's




concept of hegemony has been the subject of extended commentary and interpretation. In general terms, it describes a situation of meaningful codification, regulation and ordering of heterogeneous social relations. Hegemony has specific virtue of denoting moments of the consolidation of social-state formations into general patterns of domination and subordination under democratic capitalism. While the struggle for hegemony may be an eternal feature of democratic capitalist orders, the consolidation of a "hegemonic bloc" characterizes periods of alliance and inter-class settlement in which certain historical tasks are undertaken by the ruling class or class fractions within a given state-form. These periods tend to be marked by "consensus," though they are by no means that. Rather hegemonic consolidation of the social order generally occurs through a series of compromises around economic and political aims, often accompanied by characteristic forms of exclusion and domination of subaltern groups and classes. These are the moments when explicitly oppositional programs have the greatest difficulty penetrating the "common-sense" of the moment, or the veil of moral and intellectual universalism that masks and binds any truly hegemonic state formation. Antonio Gramsci, The Gramsci Reader, ed. David Forgacs (New York, 1990), 205.

74. Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (New York, 1987), 182; George Lipsitz, A Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in 1940s (Champain-Urbana, IL, 1991).

75. Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion, 183, 188. 76. On liberalism and the universal enemy see Stanley Fish, "Boutique

Multiculturalism," Multiculturalism and American Democracy, 87. On the ubiquity of war as a metaphor within U.S. political culture since the 1930s see Sherry, In the Shadow of War.

77. Quoted in Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York, 1969), 111.

78. As Pierre Bourdieu writes, symbolic power is in an exemplary sense, "the power to produce groups." As important wielders of symbolic power, intellectuals are thus crucially involved in the on-going contest over the internal borders of American nationhood. The culture wars and the cold war have both involved struggles over legitimate political languages (revolving around questions of violence), and over the legitimate boundaries and contents of civic identities. My suggestion is that the exclusionary logics of the past have been transferred to the present, and that it is one of the tasks of cultural criticism to unravel this process. See Bourdieu, "Social Space and Symbolic Power," In Other Words (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 138; For an elaboration of the concept of the "internal border," see Etienne Balibar, Masses,Classes and Ideas (New York, 1994).

79. Lasch, Agony, 69. 80. Ibid., 82. 81. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites (New York, 1995). 82. Note the resonance between the following from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the

epigraph that heads this section of the essay: "The ethnic upsurge became a cult and today it threatens to become a counter-revolution against the original theory of America as "one people, a common culture, a single nation," Disunting, 12.

83. C. Vann Woodward, The Future of the Past (New York, 1989), 144. Also see Woodward, "Meanings for Multiculturalism," in Multiculturalism and American Democracy, 55-68.

84. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein,



RECODING EMPIRE 521

Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London, 1991); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (New York, 1990).

85. Cornel West, "The New Cultural Politics of Difference," in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson (New York, 1990).

86. Stuart Hall, "Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance" (UNESCO, 1980).

87. Sean Wilentz, "Populism Redux," Dissent (spring 1995): 150. 88 . Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience (New York, 1967). Also see

Taylor Branch, "Interview with David Barsamian," The Progressive 65 (May 1998): 34-38.

89. King, Jr., Trumpet, 31. 90. Ibid., 3 (emphasis added). 91. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremaid (Madison, Wisc., 1978). 92. Hollinger, Postethnic America. Further page references to this work are cited

parenthetically in the text. 93. Hollinger, "How Wide the Circle," 335 (emphasis added). 94. Hollinger's examples of rooted particularisms in this passage, moreover, are not

as neutral as they appear, especially when we consider that the communal ambit of the "nation" has more often than not been taken as the birthright of the white southerner, rarely if ever the case for the "Chinese ethnic."

95. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 48. Also see Nikhil Pal Singh, "Toward an Effective Anti- Racism," in Beyond Pluralism, ed. Ned Landsman, et.al. (Champain-Urbana, Ill., 1998).

96. Balibar, "Ambiguous Universalism," 70. Also see Jacques Derrida, "Declara- tions of Independence," New Political Science 15 (summer 1986).

97. Balibar, "Ambiguous Universalism," 71. 98. Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question," in The Marx Engels Reader ed. Robert

Tucker (New York, 1972), 26-52. 99. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 96. 100. Schlesinger, Jr., Disuniting, 12, 138. 101. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 95. 102. Balibar, "Ambiguous Universalism," 61-62. 103. In recent work Hollinger continues to grapple with these issues with care and

thoughtfulness. There is much on which we agree about how to think about nationalism, transnationalism and universalist aspirations. I still believe, however, that he remains too anxious to re-empower the narrative of liberal nationalism in the U.S. as something that positively transcends salient "subnational" divisions and differences- especially those associated with "race." Moreover, like other critics of multiculturalism, he implies that the primary impetus toward maintaining such differences comes from racialized populations (or as he says, "descent communities") themselves. I want to turn this on its head and ask (with Ellison) why the liberal nationalism of this era has so readily changed its shape and confounded us? In other words, why has liberal nationalism been so unreliable in its universalism, so readily employed as a rationalization for inequality and state violence, so implicated in the perpetuation of differences it claims to want to dismantle? The stories many liberal nationalists (though not Hollinger) now tell about the 60s, multiculturalism, race, crime, welfare, affirmative action, (the Gulf War?!) are the latest examples of this phenomenon. The universalist move, if we are to make it, will require a much more patient exposition and working through of what Walter Benjamin called "the traditions of the oppressed." I regret that I cannot do justice to all of Hollinger's nuanced arguments here. David Hollinger,




"National Solidarity at the End of the Twentieth Century: Reflections on the U.S. and Liberal Nationalism," Journal of American History 84 (September 1997): 559-69; David Hollinger, "National Culture and Communities of Descent," Reviews in American History 26 (1998): 312-28.

104. Singh, "The Black Panthers," 73. 105. Quoted in Holly Sklar, Trilaterialism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite

Planning for World Managment (Boston, Mass., 1980), 27. 106. Ibid., 40. 107. Ibid., 41-43. 108. Quoted in Sheila Collins, The Rainbow Challenge: The Jackson Campaign and

the Future of U.S. Politics, (New York, 1986), 57. 109. C. L. R. James, "Black People in the Urban Areas of the U.S.," in The C. L R.

James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw (London, 1992), 378. 110. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World

Order (New York, 1996); Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandemonium: Ethnicity and International Politics (New York, 1995).

111. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, 21. Further page references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text.



Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy

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