American Politics - 2000 and beyond

Alan Grant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429684951
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2000: An examination of some of the key themes and issues central to the understanding of the contemporary political scene in the USA at the beginning of the 21st century. Bringing together the work of a number of academics with expertise in the field, it focuses on the state of American democracy and the working of the nation's governmental and political institutions. The topics covered include: American society and the politics of "Balkanisation"; party politics in Congress since the Republican takeover of control; presidential power and the experience of the Clinton presidency; the making of foreign policy; the office of independent counsel after the Starr report; the Rehnquist Supreme Court in a post-civil rights era; the influence of the Christian right; the Republican Party policy agenda; campaign finance reform; elections, voting behaviour and campaigning; and the reshaping of the federal system.

1
America Divided: The Politics of ‘Balkanization’

Edward Ashbee

During the 1980s and 1990s, evocations of economic, social and cultural cleavage became commonplace in the United States. In Two Nations, a New York Times bestseller, Andrew Hacker argued that, despite the economic and social progress that minorities had made during the post-segregation years, whites and blacks still constituted 'separate, hostile [and] unequal' nations.¹ The country remained, Hacker concluded, a profoundly racist society.

Others also talked of division and fracture, but instead emphasized what they saw as a backlash against minorities. Race and gender fused together in references to 'angry white males', most starkly symbolized by those who bombed the FBI building in Oklahoma City in April 1995.² White male bitterness was attributed to both economic and political factors. Whereas some blacks and women had made gains in the labour market since the 1960s, many white men, particularly those employed in the manufacturing sector, faced job losses and the destruction of long-held certainties. Affirmative action programmes, which attempted to ensure that women and minorities were more fully represented in occupations traditionally dominated by white males, only intensified feelings of resentment and displacement.

The claim that the United States is racially fractured cuts across traditional ideological and political cleavages. Conservatives as well as liberals have acknowledged that the integrated society sought by the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s has not been realized. Robert Bork, the conservative jurist whom President Reagan unsuccessfully nominated to the US Supreme Court in 1987, suggests that the United States may 'never know racial peace'.³ He points to African-American support for Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, a black nationalist organization that seeks the physical separation of the races. He also cites the contrast between black and white responses to the acquittal of O.J. Simpson, the black National Football League player and film actor, on charges of murder in October 1995. An overwhelming majority of whites saw Simpson as guilty and were horrified by the verdict. However, as Bork notes, 'blacks of all levels of education and income were jubilant, even those who thought Simpson guilty'.⁴

As the 1990s progressed, the sense of racial polarization conveyed in events such as the Simpson trial was compounded by a growing comprehension of ethnic and racial cleavages lying beyond the black–white divide. The scale of Latino and Asian immigration, and the apparent failure of the traditional mechanisms of assimilation, attracted particular attention. The increasing diversity of the United States became a recurrent theme in journals such as The Atlantic Monthly, and Peter Brimelow's book, Alien Nation – a manifesto against immigration – became a basis for debate.⁵

Against this background, the term Balkanization began to be widely used. It is, as Mark Ellis and Richard Wright record, 'a metaphor for ethnic antagonism, territorial disintegration and societal malaise'.⁶ In its most unrestrained form, it suggests that growing racial and ethnic divisions will eventually lead to secession from the United States. Chilton Williamson, formerly literary and senior editor at National Review, has raised the spectre of Reconquista, He asserts that there will be attempts to pull southern California and neighbouring states away from the United States: 'there has been talk in the Mexican-American community for at least two decades of using their numbers and the vote to effect the secession of several of the Southwestern states, which would either be incorporated by Mexico or form the new Nation of Aztlan'.⁷ The growing strength of separatist feeling in Quebec, and predictions that the French-speaking province will eventually secede from Canada, has given such fears a degree of credibility.

Samuel Huntington of Harvard University does not cite secession as a danger, but he does assert that the national unity of the United States will, with the erosion of a common culture, depend solely upon the extent to which Americans continue to believe in guiding principles such as individualism and equal representation. This, he asserts, is 'a much more fragile basis for unity than a national culture richly grounded in history. If ... the consensus on liberal democracy disintegrates, the United States could join the Soviet Union on the ash heap of history.'⁸

Other well-known figures have talked in similar terms. Arthur Schlesinger Jr, the distinguished historian who served as an adviser to President Kennedy, has warned of 'the fragmentation, resegregation and tribalization of American life'.⁹ The novelist and essayist, Gore Vidal, has argued that 'only by force can we try to control a whole series of escalating race wars here at home, as well as the brisk occupation of the southern tier of the United States by those Hispanics from whom we stole land in 1847'.¹⁰

There are other claims. The attempts to hold the United States together in the face of growing diversity may, it is said, lead the federal government to add still further to its powers. Furthermore, the Balkanization process – and multiculturalist ideologies that celebrate rather than condemn diversity – has given credence to the concept of 'group rights' under which individuals are recruited to jobs, politically represented and judged under the law as members of a particular ethnic grouping. Such 'rights' are seen by conservatives and some liberals as a negation of the principles of individualism and self-reliance upon which the United States was founded.

There are foreign as well as domestic policy implications. It has been suggested that Balkanization will increasingly lead to a process of 'finding or inventing enemies' so as to bind the country together.¹¹ Benjamin Schwarz, reflecting on American actions in Bosnia, argues that US foreign policy is being shaped by growing diversity. It is an attempt to affirm that multiethnic states can survive and prosper despite their heterogeneity:

the motivation behind this latest summons to a foreign-policy crusade, as with earlier summonses, lies not in external threats but in our own insecurities. These conflicts scare us because we see in them an image of ourselves ... Afraid to face our own problems directly, we look elsewhere, and encourage other countries to prove to us that more pluralism and more tolerance are all that are needed to reunite divided societies.¹²

This chapter assesses Balkanization as well as the other representations of cultural and political fracture, such as multiculturalism, that are allied to it. It also considers the counter-arguments that are put forward by those who assert that the United States, far from being destroyed, is being reinvigorated by immigration, the growth of minority communities and the expression of different cultural forms. It argues that the fears and hopes engendered by 'Balkanization' may, in certain circumstances, contribute to a process of political reconfiguration.

Demographic Shifts

Although events such as the Simpson trial illustrated the scale of the gulf between white and black America, the concept of Balkanization is rooted in the shifting demography of the United States. The projections drawn up by the US Bureau of the Census indicate that, between the end of the twentieth century and 2050, the proportion of Hispanics or Latinos in the US population will increase dramatically.¹³ In May 1998, they constituted 11.2 per cent of the population. By 2050, the figure will have reached 24.5 per cent. The Asian-Pacific-American communities are set to grow, during the same period, from 3.6 per cent to 8.7 per cent. The predicted increase in the African-American population is of only marginal proportions, but it is expected to rise from 12.1 to about 13.6 per cent. There is an inevitable corollary to these projections. The white, non-Hispanic share of the population, which constituted 72.4 per cent in 1998, will, by 2050, have fallen to 52.8 per cent, and at some point during the latter half of the twenty-first century, the United States will cease to have a white majority.¹⁴ California will be the first of the contiguous states to 'fall'.¹⁵ Then, as The Economist has reported, 'the transformation of minorities into a majority will, if present trends persist, slowly be repeated across the rest of the country: in Texas by about 2015, followed by Arizona, New York, Nevada, New Jersey and Maryland'.¹⁶

However, forecasts such as these only partially capture the ways in which the United States is being changed. There has also been a process of fragmentation and diversification within the Asian, Latino and African-American communities. In 1970, for example, 96 per cent of Asian-Americans were Japanese, Chinese or Filipino. At the end of the 1990s, however, these groups constituted only about 50 per cent of Asian-Americans. The communities have been joined by sizeable numbers of Koreans, Vietnamese, Asian Indians, Cambodians, Pakistanis and Thais.

The Latino population is also characterized by profound diversity. Indeed, some observers have, for this reason, questioned the legitimacy of terms such as 'Latino' or 'Hispanic'. The words embrace those who can trace their families back to the period before 1848, when the southwestern states were part of Mexico, those who came to the United States as immigrants from Mexico together with their families, as well as sizeable numbers from Puerto Rico (a US territory), El Salvador, Cuba and the other nations of central and south America. Similarly, the black population includes not only the descendants of slaves, but also immigrants of Caribbean origin.

These demographic shifts are the consequence of increased immigration, differential birth rates and a slowdown in the overall rate of population growth, US immigration laws were amended in 1965 so as to end the system of numerical quotas that had, until then, restricted entry, particularly for those from outside Europe. In place of this, immigration policy was reformulated and based upon the principle of family reunification. Those able to show family kinship with existing US residents were admitted. In the wake of the 1965 Act, the number of immigrants rose dramatically. Between 1991 and 1996, there were, for example, 6 146 213 legal immigrants. Further-more, by 1996, a further five million people lived in the country illegally.¹⁷ The consequences of immigration have, in turn, been magnified by a differential birth rate. Between 1990 and 1996, there were 106.3 births per thousand Latina women. The corresponding figure for whites was 65.6.

The Components of ‘Balkanization’

The claim that the United States is being 'Balkanized' builds on the above statistics. Although the term is often used imprecisely and depends upon assertion rather than developed forms of argument, those who employ it make five principal claims.

‘Residential Segregation’

There is, firstly, a stress on the degree to which the minority communities and white society are spatially divided and isolated from each other. Although there are other measures, the extent to which there is 'residential segregation' has been recorded in Karl Taeuber's dissimilarity index. A score of 1.00 indicates the total physical separation between groupings. A score of 0.00 indicates total integration. In cities such as Detroit (0.88), Cleveland (0.85) and Milwaukee (0.83), a large majority of whites and blacks live in separate neighbourhoods. Although it takes a less severe form, Hispanics are also subject to 'residential segregation'. The New York dissimilarity index for Hispanics is 0.66. In Newark, New Jersey, the figure is 0.67. In Los Angeles, it is 0.62. Although more integrated, many Asian-Americans also live in largely separate neighbourhoods. The dissimilarity index reveals figures of 0.51, 0.54 and 0.65 for Buffalo (New York), Mobile (Alabama) and Wausau (Wisconsin) respectively.

The growth of minority-dominated neighbourhoods is matched by the development of 'gated enclave communities' among relatively affluent whites. In 1990-95, a third of new housing developments in Los Angeles had locked gates. Within these communities the residents are guarded by security staff and physically sealed off 'from the vulgar majority of their countrymen'.¹⁸ In place of municipal and state provision, they rely instead on private services. Their children attend private schools. The essential utilities are provided by community associations rather than the authorities.

However, although the growing divisions within cities are important, 'residential segregation' must be placed in a much broader context. William H. Frey, senior fellow at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, argues that the most important demographic divide is between the different regions of the United States. Immigration has been concentrated in a small number of states, all o...