Introduction: the New Right - Storm-Troopers in the Name of Liberty
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Notes Introduction: The New Right - Storm-Troopers in the Name of Liberty 1. Arthur Miller; quoted in Observer Review (15 October 1995) p. 7. 2. Many scholars have elaborated on the breakdown of the post-war con sensus in the mid-1970s. For example, see: Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State (London: Macmillan, 1988); Thomas Ferguson, 'Party Realignment and American Industrial Structure: The Investment Theory of Political Parties in Historical Perspective', Research in Political Economy, vol. 6 (1983); Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, 'The Reagan Victory: Corporate Coalitions in the 1980 Campaign', in Ferguson and Rogers (eds), Hidden Election: Politics and Economics in the 1980 Presidential Campaign (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981). 3. A moral panic involves sudden hysteria about particular activities or pre-existing groups thought to engage in them, accompanied by calls for exclusion or suppression. Moral panics are especially useful during those periods of societal transition, such as the present, when the moral boundaries of the national community are being redrawn. For more on the concept of moral panic, see: Stanley Cohen, Fo/Jc Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Philip Jenkins, Intimate Enemies (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992); Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978). 4. This phrase refers to a book by that title: Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (University of Chicago Press, 1988). 5. The concept of race is used here to refer not to a biological reality but to a social construction. Many authors (for example, Robert Miles, Racism,1989) place quotation markers around the word 'race' to remind the reader of this point, while others prefer the term 'racial ization' (for example, Stephen Small, Racialised Barriers: The Black Experience in the United States and England in the 1980s [London: Routledge, 1994] or 'racial' (for example, Howard Winant, Racial Conditions, 1994). Although often cumbersome, such detailed atten tion to the use of language is laudable in its goal not to implicate social scientists in the reproduction of a concept that has been proven invalid. I fully subscribe to this view of race as a social and not a biological construction, although hereafter I do not place markers (quotes) around the word. It is also important to note difficulties asso ciated with the use of the term 'black', as it has a different empirical referent in each country. In the United States, the term is used most often to refer to people of Mrican origin, although I employ the term 274 Notes 275 as a political alternative to the more troublesome 'non-white' con struction to include Latinos and other so-called minority groups. At times in the text, especially when I am dealing with specific policy issues such as immigration, I use the term 'black' in the more limited sense in order to distinguish between people of Mrican origin and Latinos, Asians, and others. In Britain, the term 'black' is sometimes used to refer to people of Mrican origin exclusively (Mricans and Mrican-Caribbeans), at other times it includes Asians and others; un fortunately there is no consensus among official bodies nor the racial ized groups themselves. One of the reasons for such lack of consensus is political; during the height of the burgeoning culture of racialized resistance in Britain, for example, the Mrican, Mrican-Caribbean and Asian communities united under the banner 'black' in their common struggle against racism, while in the relatively more depoliticized (or identity politics) context of the 1980s and 1990s, racialized identity has once again been broken down into respective ethnic and even na tional identity compartments. In an attempt to reduce the level of confusion on this matter, I half-heartedly use the tepid terms 'people of color' and 'communities of color' to refer to so-called minorities or non-whites, unless I am talking about policies that target particular groups, in which case I use the more specific term (that is, Mrican Caribbean, Latino, and so on). 6. The phrase 'right turn' comes from a book by that title: Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986). It refers to the abandonment of core post-war liberal commitments: progres sive taxation, social welfare programs, business regulation, the protec tion of labor unions, and programs of positive action for women and people of color which occurred during the early Reagan and Thatcher years. 7. On family and moral issues see: Allen Hunter and Linda Gordon, 'Danger from the Right', Radical America, 16 (May-June 1982). On status anxieties see Alan Crawford, Thunder on the Right (New York: Pantheon 1980). For an emphasis on intellectual response to the 1960s see: Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980); Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). For detail about the role of religious mobilization see: Sara Diamond, Spiritual Warfare (Boston: South End Press, 1989). From the perspective of electoral realignment see: Gillian Peele, Revival and Reaction: The Right in Contemporary America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 8. On race and the electoral right see: Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (London: Hutchinson, 1987); Stuart Hall, 'The Great Moving Right Show', New Internationalist (March 1984); Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70's Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1982). On racism and the press see: Paul Gordon and David Rosenberg, The Press and Black People in Britain (London: The Runnymede Trust, 1989); Teun van Dijk, 276 Notes Racism and the Press (London: Routledge, 1991). On the far right see: Michael Billig, Fascists: A Psychological View of the National Front (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). Important studies of Thatcherism include: Dennis Kavanagh, Thatcherism and British Politics: The End of Consensus? (Oxford University Press, 1987); Peter Riddell, The Thatcher Era and Its Legacy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); and Robert Skidelsky (ed.), Thatcherism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988). 9. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1994, 1986). 10. Thomas Edsall with Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1992). 11. Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 12. Gill Seidel, The White Discursive Order: The British New Right's Discourse on Cultural Racism with Particular Reference to the Salisbury Review' (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1987); 'Culture, Nation and "Race" in the British and French New Right', in The Ideology of the New Right, ed. by Ruth Levitas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986). 13. Anna Marie Smith, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality (Cambridge University Press, 1994). 14. Stephen Small, Racialised Barriers. 15. Valuable work has been done in this regard, for example see Paul Gordon and Francesca Klug, New Right New Racism (London: Searchlight, 1986). 16. Russ Bellant, 'The Coors Connection: How Coors Family Philanthropy Undermines Democratic Pluralism', (Boston: Political Research Associates, 1990); Russ Bellant, 'Old Nazis, the New Right and the Reagan Administration: The Role of Domestic Fascist Networks in the Republican Party and their Effect on U.S. Cold War Politics', (Boston: Political Research Associates, 1988). Both are now published by South End Press. 17. Anna Marie Smith, New Right Discourse. 18. Authors who develop this point include: David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993) and Nancy MacLean, The Masks of Chivalry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 19. Katherine Verderey develops a similar argument about the increased salience of nationalism during the period of the exit from com munism, in her 'Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post-Socialist Romania', Slavic Review, vol. 52, no. 2 (Summer 1993) pp. 179-203. 20. Examples of structuralist accounts include: Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (New York: Verso, 1986); Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, The Hidden Election: Politics and Economics in the 1980 Presidential Campaign (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981); Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Tum: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986); Bob Jessop et al., Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988); Paul Hirst, After Thatcher (London: Collins, 1989). 21. Ferguson and Rogers; The Hidden Election and Right Term. Notes 277 22. Jessop et al., Thatcherism For an interesting exchange between these authors and Stuart Hall, see: Stuart Hall, 'Authoritarian Populism: A Reply', New Left Review, 151 (1985) pp. 106-13. 23. Jessop. et al., Thatcherism, p. 43. 24. This point is related to a distinction between strong versus weak ver sions of the concept of hegemony; for a discussion of this distinction· see: Smith, New Right Discourse, pp. 29-40.. 25. Stuart Hall, 'The British Left Mter Thatcherism', Socialist Review (March-April 1987) p. 50. 26. Bob Blauner, 'Talking Past Each Other: Black and White Languages of Race', The American Prospect, 10 (Summer 1992) pp. 55-64. 27. John Solomos, 'Political Language and Racial Discourse', European Journal ofIntercultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (1991) pp. 21-34. 28. Credit for the term 'key categories of meaning' is due to Carla Willig, 'AIDS - A Study of the Social Construction of Knowledge', (un published doctoral dissertation: Cambridge University, 1991). 1 Race and the Right Turn: The Symbolic Conflict Approach 1. For an elaborated discussion of this point see: Seidel, 'The White Discursive Order'; and 'Culture, Nation and "Race"'. 2. Paul Weyrich, quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Holy Terror: The Fundamentalist War on America's Freedom in Religion, Politics and Our Private Lives (New York: Delta, 1982) p.