I. The
Situation America’s economic decline is taking a peculiar form: the economic
foundations of a free and fair society are slowly being destroyed
by “normal” economic change under the aegis of a criminally incompetent
conservative government. This decline is especially ominous
for black America because it destroys the prospects for equal opportunity
in American life. Real equal opportunity requires substantial
economic redistribution where those who have are taxed in order
to improve the lives of poor and working people. The decline
of equal opportunity in the United States could be averted if the
economy were managed through intelligent, far-sighted and progressive
economic policies.
Unfortunately, our current conservative rulers
have so wrecked the nation’s economic prospects that economic
justice may be off the public agenda for the next generation,
if not forever.
The coming economic storms brought on by economic
evolution and conservative folly will encourage the nation to
dispense with justice
on the false belief that social decency is inconsistent with economic
renewal or even survival. If too much of black America remains
financially weak, badly schooled, unskilled, sick, unorganized
and dependent on the charity of others – whether through private
beneficence or public welfare – we will become the victims of immoral
but inevitable social triage. Yet, black America is in a
position to build up enough intellectual, financial and organizational
capital to meet our own needs and to become a real political force
in the fight for social justice.
For better or worse, black America’s future is brightest if we
become the nation’s best educated, most intellectually sophisticated,
most highly developed social group that succeeds spectacularly
in the academy and the marketplace while we push the nation toward
justice in the interest of self-protection. This will be
a difficult task, not least because so many of us are poor, badly
schooled, unemployed, sick and afraid. But we have no choice:
we must find a way to traverse the chasm between our current state
and one where we compete successfully in schools, jobs and politics
on our own terms, so much so that we gain real power to shape public,
cultural and business affairs.
If we fail in this task, the global economy
and the realities of American politics will sweep us onto history’s trash heap, leaving
little more than stories about how blacks freed themselves from
apartheid in America by the 1960’s only to falter when the nation’s
economic decline ended equal opportunity across class and color
lines. This cannot be our story.
The following paragraphs outline the connection
between national economic decline and the economic fortunes of
black America. This
piece ends with a plea for us to understand why economic circumstances
force the Republicans to continue their war on black America while
the Democrats must abandon black people in the interest of electoral
success. A succeeding essay explores the contours of
a successful long-term economic development program for black America
in the face of liberal duplicity and conservative animus.
II. Economic Decline, Social
Triage and Black America
American economic decline is being driven by
four forces. First,
the emergence of India and China in the global economy means that
there are now three billion more buyers and sellers in the marketplace. The
good news is that there are three billion more potential buyers
of American goods, though the vast majority of these folks are
too poor to be much of a customer base for US business at the present
time. In addition, global trade means that American consumers
benefit because low-wage workers from India and China produce low
cost, high quality products. The bad news is that global
trade creates a global labor market where American workers must
compete with a hundreds of millions of people who are as smart
as they are and willing to work for less. However, even the
best-educated Americans face growing long-term competition from
abroad as more and more people acquire the scientific and technical
skills to compete in the most technologically advanced sectors
of the global economy.
Second, immigration is increasing the supply
of skilled and especially unskilled labor in the US. There is substantial evidence
that the collapse in the wages of younger workers of all colors
with only a high school education as well as increasing numbers
of modestly educated older workers is due to the massive increase
in the labor force due to immigration from Latin America. This
migration is leading to tension between Latino and non-Latino workers,
fueling a destructive and counterproductive black-Latino racial
conflict among low-income populations with common economic interests.
Third, ongoing developments in information technology, bio-technology,
micro-electronics and material science increase the demand for
highly educated service workers whose skills go into creating technologies
that destroy the jobs of modestly schooled labor. Technological
change in a market economy generates new technologies, machines,
products and occupations that displace existing products and ways
of working that are no longer cost effective or desirable; in other
words people as well as technologies become obsolete.
The obsolescence of human beings in the American
economy is an accelerating problem made worse by the fact that
people with the
wrong skills must rely on government to protect their livelihood
as well as their children’s prospects. The winners in modern
economic life – highly educated, high-income workers as well as
truly wealthy people – resent supporting the losers in the economic
struggle, particularly when they too feel the economic pressure
of emerging India and China on their own well-being.
Fourth, while our conservative rulers are not
to blame for this state of affairs, they have responded to these
challenges in the
most incompetent way imaginable. Most American workers are either
experiencing real economic decline or are threatened with decline
because the rest of the world is catching up with the United States. At
the same time, our economy continues to grow, with the vast bulk
of the benefits of progress going to the top one fifth of our most
competitive workers – well-educated workers in the most innovative
sectors of the economy. We cannot stop the world from adopting
the potent mixture of modern science and competitive markets as
the antidote to poverty, but we can make sure that our people are
better educated, our organizations better run, our society truly
fair and our equipment the most efficient in the world.
III. The Economic Quagmire
A commitment to keep America both competitive
and fair means taxing the well-off to make sure everyone has
a real shot at doing well – good
schools, decent health care, housing, and a reasonable minimum
living standard. But the social deal requires government
to tax the well-off to support the poorly off so long as everyone
works as hard as they can in school and on the job. People
who refuse to work or study are not to be supported because global
competition is far too stringent to allow anyone to be lazy at
the public’s expense. Real equal opportunity for all combined
with maximum effort from all is the best way for American society
to respond to the challenges posed by contemporary technology,
skill and trade driven capitalism.
Our conservative governors will have none of
this. Conservatives
resist promoting real equal opportunity on the theory that it just
takes good money from the productive classes while wasting it on
lazy and stupid people – especially black people. Conservatives
cut taxes on the rich on the theory that this would lead to an
explosion of job growth and technological improvements – even though
this “trickle down” approach failed completely when Reagan tried
it. The tax cuts along with defense spending increases due
to the war on terror as well as a number of truly stupid policies
(like the Medicare prescription drug bill) have created budget
deficits so large that the nation is on the brink of long term
fiscal ruin. In essence, the nation has borrowed so much
money to make rich people richer while the poor get poorer – and
the middle goes nowhere – that we must now reverse tax cuts and
make enormous budget cuts in everything from health care to schooling
in order to keep the nation from drowning in debt.
The hard truth is that the United States government
cannot rebuild our economy to face the challenges noted above
without tremendous
economic sacrifice for the foreseeable future. But the winners
in the current economic game – the well-educated and wealthy – are
not about to raise their own taxes to support the losers, particularly
when conservatives insist that this sort of thing is a bad idea. Further,
the racial warfare between black, Latino and white working people
over the crumbs falling from the table of the well-off precludes
the possibility of worthwhile progressive politics in an age where
the Republicans have become uniquely skilled at hate politics.
IV. The Clinton Abandonment,
Part Two
No one really thinks that the Democrats, as
currently constituted, matter much. The working class majority in this country,
split though it is into warring racial factions, can’t rely on
a party that is financed by a coalition of highly educated workers
and business liberals with a mild social conscience. The
people who pay for the Democratic Party are not, for the moment,
threatened by economic change nearly as much as they are threatened
by the near fascist cultural politics of the Republicans. The
Democrats have to win the votes of economically insecure white
workers who are convinced that their enemies are blacks, Latinos,
gay people and cultural liberalism rather than incompetent conservative
policies in an age of economic change.
In time, the Democrats will win this battle
once the scale of conservative failure becomes clear, but they
will also see the
electoral wisdom of disassociating themselves from black people
so as not to offend suspicious whites. The Democrats will
have to demote (and perhaps dismiss) black people, at least temporarily,
in order to gain the votes of anti-black working people so as to
protect the valuable achievements of cultural liberalism. This
abandonment will not mean the return of Jim Crow or the end of
anti-discrimination laws, but rather a growing disinterest in issues
of concern to black people unless these are shared by the most
important members of the Democrats coalition: business liberals,
conservative whites, and Latinos. The easiest way for the
Democrats to prove that they are the party of the common (non-black)
man or woman is to repeat Clinton’s Sister Souljah move of 1992:
tell black people to get in line, shut up, and accept the fact
that the Democratic Party is about everyone’s problems, not the
special (presumptively self-inflicted) problems of black people. (Let
us at least hope the Democrats do not instead choose to revisit
Clinton’s brilliant and beastly killing of Rickey Lee Rector to
prove their independence from black people. Recall that Rector
was a mentally impaired prisoner in Arkansas so out of touch with
reality that he asked if he could save the desert from his last
meal for after his execution. Then again, we must also hope
that Al Gore’s Willie Horton move, which George Bush the Elder
only imitated, isn’t seen as efficacious by a Democratic presidential
aspirant eager to appear tough on “crime” i.e. black people. Still,
we can be quite sure that some sort of subtle or not so subtle
nigger-smacking symbolism is in the works.)
There is no way for black America to avoid
being demoted or dismissed by the Democrats so long as we are
such an economically, intellectually
and organizationally weak social coalition. We cannot become
part of the Republican coalition given the firm place of white
supremacists in the party. Even if the Republicans were to
eject white nationalists from the party – a foolish move given
the greater size of this racist faction compared to black America – the
economic agenda of conservatives offers nothing to low and moderate-income
black majority.
The first step in the economic development
of black America under contemporary conditions is for us to realize
that we are a profoundly
undesirable people from the perspective of the major parties. The
Republicans consider us as vermin, while the Democrats see us as
an ever heavier political albatross. Yet, our circumstances
are such that we can build a road to real economic prosperity in
these tough times by using our limited resources wisely, building
up our intellectual and social capital, investing in ourselves,
forming realistic and limited coalitions across the hardening black/brown
color line and playing a new form of American political chess that
exploits contemporary divisions among white Americans to our advantage. The
next essay explores this development program, and post-left/right
black politics, in some detail.
Marcellus Andrews is an economist and senior research fellow
at the New America Foundation. Dr. Andrews writes on economic
policy and economic justice for academic and popular audiences,
including The Political Economy of Hope and Fear: Capitalism
and the Black Condition in America (1999, NYU Press) and Taking
Back Capitalism: A Capitalist Road to Economic Justice (forthcoming,
NYU Press). Dr. Andrews received a PhD in economics from Yale
University and has taught economics at Wellesley College as
well as the City University of New York.
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