Read this book: Review of The Twilight of Equality? by Lisa Duggan
In The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Beacon Press, Boston 2003), Lisa Duggan exposes critical elements of the ongoing political and economic success of conservatives and the comparable weaknesses of the progressive Left. From the attack on public universities to welfare reform, she examines how conservatives, which she refers to as neoliberals, continue to get resources redistributed upward while progressives continue to struggle for downward redistribution. Her book is an analysis of neoliberal strategies that link political economy with culture and how progressives can more successfully challenge the neoliberal march. This is useful for racial justice activists seeking strategic tools to identify connections between their work and issues of economics, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
Duggan locates the struggle between the redistribution of resources up or down in the context of Liberalism, the philosophy that has accompanied capitalism. This philosophy has taken and defined terms (like “private” and “public”) in service to funneling money and control upward to the few. Neoliberals (such as “Compassionate Conservatives” and “New Democrats”) represent the newest incarnation of Liberalism. The context of neoliberalism fundamentally shifts one’s political frame of reference away from conservatives versus liberals to those who advocate for resources heading upward versus those advocating downward. Not only does this unite progressives with a common vision, but this recasting, Duggan asserts, is a crucial step for those who otherwise get stuck reproducing neoliberal agendas when we support– fail to adequately challenge–foundational neoliberal ideas like “privatization” or “personal responsibility,” or falsely pit “identity politcs” against “economic justice.”
Duggan demonstrates that neoliberal economic and political goals have been and continue to be constructed with the cultural materials at hand. In other words, neoliberal strategies have connected economics with gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc. Exploring California’s anti-tax Proposition 13 in 1978, for example, she demonstrates how conservatives exploited a desire among white home owners to see their tax dollars used in service to themselves, in an extremely narrow sense of the way taxes serve the public good. This served to push through a final bill that ended up lowering taxes far more significantly for businesses than for homeowners. Duggan also exposes conservatives — manipulation of racial codings in the campaign; the language of “taxeaters” versus “taxpayers” pitted urban, supposedly people of color against white suburbanites who came to see themselves as paying for those who did not. This is identity politics played with agility…even as neoliberals deny the economic and political agendas motivating their actions. She strongly argues that only a Left politics that asserts progressive economic and political goals in ways that maximize how they are “cultured” (raced, gendered, etc.) has the potential to succeed.
By continually reiterating her point that political economy concerns operate through “racial, gendered, and sexual hierarchies” (p.73), Duggan is at risk for seeming to prioritize economic oppression over other forms. In fact, she does provide a well-theorized and substantiated political/economic lens as the basis for her argument and does not, for example, suggest similar foundational theory for understanding racial or gender oppression. It could be useful to see whether her framework could be shifted toward analyzing how conservative goals to maintain white privilege are framed in terms of economics, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
Duggan foregrounds recent progressive examples like the environmental movement, HIV/AIDS activism, and anti-globalization organizing, as exemplary of the kind of integrated analysis she is naming. She also points to cracks in the neoliberal front typified by worldwide resentment of its policies. She closes: “For it is pleasure and collective caretaking, love and the egalitarian circulation of money–allied to clear and hard-headed political analysis offered generously–that will create the space for a progressive politics that might both imagine and create something worth living for (p.88).”