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Frontlash/Backlash: the Crisis of Solidarity and the Threat to Civil Institutions

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Frontlash/Backlash: the Crisis of Solidarity and the Threat to Civil Institutions Ó American Sociological Association 2018 DOI: 10.1177/0094306118815497 http://cs.sagepub.com FEATURED ESSAY Frontlash/Backlash: The Crisis of Solidarity and the Threat to Civil Institutions JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER Yale University [email protected] It is fear and loathing time for the left, sociol- The first thing to recognize is that ogists prominently among them. Loathing Trumpism and the alt-right are nothing for President Trump, champion of the alt- new, not here, not anywhere where right forces that, marginalized for decades, civil spheres have been simultaneously are bringing bigotry, patriarchy, nativism, and enabled and constrained. The depredations nationalism back into a visible place in the of Trumpism are not unique, first-time-in- American civil sphere. Fear that these threaten- American-history things. What they con- ing forces may succeed, that democracy will be stitute, instead, are backlash movements destroyed, and that the egalitarian achieve- (Alexander 2013). ments of the last five decades will be lost. Fem- Sociologists have had a bad habit of think- inism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, sexual cit- ing of social change as linear, a secular trend izenship, ecology, and internationalism—all that is broadly progressive, rooted in the these precarious achievements have come enlightening habits of modernity, education, under vicious, persistent attack. economic expansion, and the shared social Fear and loathing can be productive when interests of humankind (Marshall 1965; they are unleashed inside the culture and Parsons 1967; Habermas [1984, 1987] 1981; social structures of a civil sphere that remains Giddens 1990). From such a perspective, con- vigorous and a vital center (Schlesinger 1949; servative movements appear as deviations, Alexander 2016; Kivisto 2019) that, even if reflecting anomie and isolation (Putnam fragile, continues to hold. In such conditions, 2000), unreason (Lipset and Raab 1970), a resistance thrives, blocking the victory of social backwardness and ‘‘empathy walls’’ Trumpism, dark and brooding as it may be. (Hochschild 2016). Trumpism challenges not just the moral and But modern society never has actually political commitments of the left, but the cul- worked in this way. Progress isn’t a secular tural and social structures of the civil sphere; unfolding; it is triggered by ‘‘frontlash’’ and it is these that provide the sociological movements, by avant-gardes whose vision underpinning of political democracy (Alex- is way ahead of their time, whose actions ander 2006, 2018). can be likened to provocative and destabi- No matter how horrifying in normative lizing breaching experiments (Garfinkel terms, we must understand the polarizing 1967; Tognato 2019), and whose victories, and excluding forces of Trumpism as socio- even when they are small and quiet but logically ‘‘normal’’—to the ongoing dynam- especially when they are big and loud, are ics of civil spheres. Only when such an anti- experienced as profoundly threatening to leftist force challenges the cultural premises vested interests, both ideal and material, and the structural foundations of civil soli- not just at the bottom but in the middle and darity does it constitute a truly fundamental even at the very top of society. Frontlash danger to democracy. Trumpism may yet do always produces backlash: movements of so, yet it seems at this point unlikely. To cultural, social, and political un-doing that understand why, we must see the big picture: aim to unwind cosmopolitan widening What are the culture and social structures of and civil incorporation. Backlash does not a civil sphere, and what are the kinds of occur because conservative cadres and social dynamics it involves? followers are anti-modern, irrational, or 5 Contemporary Sociology 48, 1 6 Featured Essay even unusually bigoted. Backlash is trig- neoliberal, even neoconservative. Not from gered, rather, because ideal and material the point of view of the white and wounded, structures of the status quo have been the status quo masses and elites! Obama ges- abruptly displaced, and those who occupied tured to a post-imperial foreign policy, those structures wish to return to the time a post-white, multicultural American ethnic- before displacement, when they were sitting ity; and he created a massive new social enti- and standing in what was obviously, and not tlement financed by taxation (Alexander and just in retrospect, a better place. Jaworsky 2014). And he was black! The In the United States, frontlash seared the Obama years were experienced as frighten- decade of the 1930s and marked the Second ingly frontlash by the status quo ante. The World War years as well. Backlash against experience of laceration triggered another labor incorporation, challenges to anti-Semi- backlash frenzy, this time in Trumpian tism and ethnic and racial bigotry, and form. Not new, but still dangerous, spread- Randian outrage over Keynesian economic ing fear and loathing on the left. controls exploded with extraordinary force What threatens democracy is not backlash. in the late 1940s and dominated the decade Backlash is inevitable as long as frontlash after: Taft-Hartley, McCarthyism, stay-at- movements destabilize established interests, home mothers, separate-but-equal races, introducing once-inconceivable reforms in cold war conformity, and sexual repression. the name of justice. The question is not Frontlash exploded again in the 1960s whether conservative movements will push (Isserman and Kazin 2000; Kazin 1995:165– back—for they do, and often successfully— 268), terrifying vested interests, mobilizing but whether, when they do, the civil sphere counter-elites and long-standing civil society can survive. groups alike. In 1968, Richard Nixon rode Democracy depends on feelings of mutual a backlash crusade into the White House, regard, on experiencing a shared solidarity vowing not only to lower the gates of the civil despite deep antipathies of interest and sphere but to reverse civil rights, feminism, ideology. There must be some historically ecology, and peace. Facing imminent failure, specific vision of a shared universalism that Nixon tried to effectuate backlash with extra- transcends the particularisms of class, race, constitutional efforts to spy and blackmail gender, sex, region, religion, and nationality. political and electoral opponents—efforts Frontlash and backlash are highly polarizing; that the Watergate crisis eventually exposed their phenomenological effect is to induce and punished. After a brief post-Watergate high anxiety that civil solidarity is breaking period, the backlash movement against civil apart. What once seemed civil—affirmative incorporation resumed, seizing national action, for example—now seems particular- political power for a dozen years, using the istic. Groups and ideas once honored— levers of central government and the soap- Confederate heroes, for example—are now box of the presidency, trying in every which trashed. Can the sense of a vital center sur- way to undermine what frontlash move- vive (Luengo and Ihlebæk 2019)? Only if civil ments had achieved. If Reaganism, too, failed solidarity can regulate ideal and material to block civil progression, conservative para- conflict in such a manner that enemies noia turned ever more cancerous during the become frenemies, that sharp antagonism is eight years of Clinton centrism, and backlash moderated and agonism thrives (Mouffe came roaring back to national power during 2000). Frontlash must be so civil-ized that it the administration of Bush the Second: Affir- eschews revolution for social democracy mative action was sharply challenged, femi- (Marshall 1965). Backlash always unfolds nist policies undermined, environmentalism under an anti-left, conservative ideology, muted, nationalistic patriotism revived; and but such conservatism can take civil or anti- militaristic responses to international rela- civil form. tions flourished. Burke ([1790] 2009) and Oakeshott (1975) The drama of frontlash and backlash are backlash philosophers of civil modera- continues. Critical sociologists have tended tion: don’t hurry so fast, they warn the left; to write off the Obama years as centrist, don’t be so arrogant as to see yourself as Contemporary Sociology 48, 1 Featured Essay 7 the master of rationality; do be more himself as the ultimate truth-teller. He concerned with maintaining trust and incre- attacks selfishness and brags about his mental ties. When backlash takes more own generosity. He claims to expose secret extreme form, however, conservative shenanigans and portrays his administration ideology becomes not moderately anti- as open for all to see. He attacks elites and radical but revolutionary: from agonism to privilege, setting himself on the people’s antagonism, from persuasion to violence, side and vowing to enlarge the rules of the from civil sphere to civil war, and from game. democracy to authoritarianism. If backlash But there is nothing new here. What we see had boiled over in the 1960s, you would and hear is the tried and true binary have had Malcolm X and the Black Panthers discourse that has, from the beginning, as the decade’s dominant political figures dynamized and polarized, enabled and and organizations, not Martin Luther King constrained actually existing civil spheres and the NAACP. If backlash boils over today, (Kivisto 2017, 2019; Mast 2019a, 2019b; we will have Steve Bannon as the nation’s Enroth 2018). Every powerful democratic dominant public intellectual (Alexander leader,
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