[Throughout the United States, racial separation remains a common
feature of collective life. The consequences are significant for left
political organizing aimed at building a multiracial working-class
majority.]
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OUR SEGREGATION PROBLEM  
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Aziz Rana
October 3, 2022
Dissent
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_ Throughout the United States, racial separation remains a common
feature of collective life. The consequences are significant for left
political organizing aimed at building a multiracial working-class
majority. _

A suburban development in Chapel Hill, North Carolina , Robert
Nickelsberg/Liaison/ Getty Images

 

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Tom Watson, a white
congressman from Georgia, worked diligently to organize white and
Black farmers into the Populist Party. He sought to appeal to the
farmers’ material interests, arguing that together, as a united
class, they could overcome Southern structures of debt bondage and
economic oppression. But Watson’s case was also based on the
communal experience he had observed in farmers’ homes. White and
Black tenants lived in “adjoining” residences, and “their houses
are almost equally destitute of comforts,” Watson wrote in 1892.
“Their living is confined to bare necessities. . . . They pay the
same high rent for gulled and impoverished land.” 

As Watson drafted these words, states across the South were
implementing Jim Crow laws, which determined where Black people could
eat, drink, sleep, and use the bathroom, as well as how they could
travel and which beaches and parks they could visit. It was not a
coincidence that these legal efforts occurred against the backdrop of
the rise of Populism. 

Following Reconstruction, white Southern politicians aimed to
eliminate spaces where white and Black people could congregate and
develop a sense of both community and solidarity. If poor white people
had less contact with their Black neighbors, they would be far more
likely to defer to white elites. As Watson declared bluntly of the
politics of separation: “You are kept apart that you may be
separately fleeced of your earnings.” 

Today, the United States is no longer segregated as a matter of
explicit law. But throughout the country—in cities and rural areas,
blue states and red ones—racial separation remains a common feature
of collective life. Alongside real improvements since the high tide of
Jim Crow, recent decades have brought profound backsliding, and many
communities and institutions are more segregated now than they were
thirty years ago. The consequences are significant for left political
organizing aimed at building a multiracial working-class majority.
Segregation has long undermined the left’s transformative ambitions,
and it remains a direct threat today.

Bernie Sanders’s defeat in the 2020 Democratic primary
notwithstanding, the past few years have been marked by positive
developments for democratic socialists. For starters, the left is
present at the political table in a way that has not been the case in
my lifetime. It has a meaningful agenda—expressed in the Fight for
$15, the Green New Deal and the Red Deal, Medicare for All, and the
vision statement of the Movement for Black Lives—that addresses many
of the central problems of American life. 

The left also enjoys genuine popularity and extra-institutional
energy. One can see this in the labor unrest and racial justice
protests that have punctuated the past half-decade. Public opinion has
also shifted in recent years, with universalist economic programs
proving especially appealing to voters. 

However, despite these promising signs, the left is at an impasse. The
potential constituency for its redistributive vision does not neatly
map onto existing party coalitions. The Obama–Biden Democratic
coalition is multiracial but not class-based. It is increasingly
organized around cultural aspirations that especially tie together
college-educated white voters with minority groups. Its political aims
involve an ameliorist but not transformative economic and racial
agenda. 

Still, whatever its limitations, this is a coalition that captures a
majority of the electorate. In a functioning democracy, that majority
would be sufficient to implement significant policy changes. But our
institutions are riddled with anti-democratic flaws—most obviously,
a state-based system of representation that gives small population
centers disproportionate power in electing senators and presidents
and, through them, in appointing federal judges with lifetime
tenures. 

The result has been the entrenchment within the Republican Party of a
white minority coalition that projects political power well beyond
its level of public backing. Meanwhile, the Democratic coalition can
win elections but does not wield the supermajority it needs to govern
effectively. This paralysis feeds a cycle of social crisis and popular
disaffection. It also solidifies party polarization, in turn
intensifying the authoritarian direction of the American right.
Precisely because the right can gain power without an actual majority,
it is incentivized to invest not in cross-party deal-making but in
minority rule, including by subverting elections.

In response, democratic socialists posit a transformative majority
built on a party realignment. A real class-based politics, left
activists and politicians argue, could reach working-class people who
either do not vote or are currently part of the Republican base. This
realigned majority would retain enough white, college-educated
constituents to represent a meaningful expansion—rather than a
replacement—of the Obama–Biden coalition. So far, this vision
remains theoretical. Sanders’s defeat in 2020 meant that there was
never a genuine test of whether he could reshape the Democratic voting
base. Since then, Biden’s first term has quashed hopes that his
election would augur a new era of reform.

We are thus in a moment of left-wing uncertainty. The Sanders strategy
of partial realignment around multiracial working-class politics feels
increasingly remote. In part, this is because the Democratic base is
built for establishment candidates, which means that the left, outside
of a few pockets, is almost always at a structural disadvantage during
primary elections. None of this would feel quite so dire if not for
the country’s ongoing and overlapping crises, including the
right’s autocratic politics. Democrats appear likely to lose their
tenuous grip on unified congressional control in 2022—and the party
faces the prospect of an even graver and more existential presidential
campaign against Trump in 2024.

For good and for ill, the political quiescence of the past
half-century is over. But our era of intensified struggle differs in
crucial ways from earlier periods of left-wing vibrancy. Activists
today operate on a political terrain
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altered by neoliberal ascendance and decades of Reaganite cultural and
political dominance. These changes have reconfigured the institutions
that once brought working people into the left.

From radical Populists in the 1890s to the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor
People’s Campaign in the 1960s, left activists have long turned to
labor as a site for building cross-racial trust and breaking white
working-class deference to business elites.

Unions haven’t always been committed to racial justice. Far from it.
The xenophobic Workingmen’s Party of California and the segregated
trade unions of the American Federation of Labor are examples of the
deeply troubled history of racism and sexism within the labor
movement. Yet it also true that, particularly in diverse workplaces,
successful union efforts have often been tied to interracial
mobilization. As political scientists Paul Frymer and Jacob M.
Grumbach have written
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many unions developed organizational and leadership “incentives to
reduce racial animus among their rank and file.” It was not
accidental that in the 1930s the CIO played a central role in shifting
white working-class attitudes about race and in linking together
racial liberalism and redistributive economic policies in the American
political imagination.

In the twentieth century, labor unions provided an intermediary
institution between individuals and society, offering a mechanism for
making sense of the wider world and for transforming inchoate beliefs
into political action. Indeed, it would not be an overstatement to say
that unions were the most important institution for integrating white
working-class constituents into multiracial left political formations.
In a segregated society, the workplace was often the only real setting
for building political trust among poorer white and Black people. In
this way, unions—as spaces where working people could develop
bonds—became a partial political substitute for the actual
geographic integration that white America resisted. 

For civil rights–era activists such as Bayard Rustin or A. Philip
Randolph, unions were crucial to the fight against segregation, but
insufficient. They envisioned a society with a multitude of
settings—neighborhoods, homes, schools, churches—in which people
could encounter one another, recognize common grievances, and develop
ties of solidarity. 

In these integrated cultural environments, anti-racist and democratic
socialist sensibilities could emerge organically. Although ideally
occurring alongside a robust labor movement, the proliferation of
multiracial institutions would also relieve some of the pressure on
workplace politics. Even in contexts of union conservatism or
declining membership, poor white and Black community members would
have opportunities to participate in shared projects or develop common
goals. 

History took us in a different direction from the one Rustin,
Randolph, and King hoped for. Today, unions continue to play an
important integrative function. Union membership is
strikingly diverse
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nearly four in ten members are minorities, nearly half are women, and
Black workers have some of the highest rates of unionization.
Surveys consistently show
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white union members demonstrate lower “racial resentment and greater
support for policies that benefit African Americans” than
non-unionized white workers do, Frymer and Grumbach write. But the
assault on the labor movement since the 1970s has reduced its
influence on society. Between 1983 and 2021, unionization rates fell
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Further exacerbating the costs of this decline is the stalling and
even reversal of integration efforts during the same years. As a
consequence of the conservative backlash against civil rights
achievements and the decades-long dominance of market logic, Americans
continue to live fundamentally separate lives when it comes to race.

The good news
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that in fifteen major cities with large Black populations, geographic
segregation declined between 1980 and 2010, according to the
dissimilarity index, which gives scores indicating, as legal scholar
Monica C. Bell writes, “how evenly distributed two groups are across
geographic space.” High scores speak to a lack of equal
distribution. And even with improvements, scores have remained
troublingly high in all contexts. 

The neighborhood of the average metro-area white resident remains
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than 70 percent white, despite the white population share of cities
decreasing in recent years to just over half. And although
middle-class minority families are moving into suburbs, the overall
effect of this shift has often been greater separation, with many
white families passively rejecting
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by moving to more distant exurbs. As Bell observes
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“while between-neighborhood separation within cities has declined
since 1970, between-_jurisdiction_ (city versus suburb) separation
has increased since 1990.” For all the improvements in cities, many
towns have become more racially segregated and more politically
isolated from one another. 

One sees similar trends in schools, where the end of legally enforced
desegregation has undermined earlier achievements. Today, average
public school segregation levels are higher
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they were in the late 1980s. The story with respect to churches is
better. Between 1998 and 2019, the percentage of American congregants
attending houses of worship in which at least eight in ten members are
of one race or ethnicity went down
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87 percent to 76 percent. But despite those improvements, the overall
numbers suggest churches often persist as spaces of racial and
cultural separation.

Finally, although immigrant labor does not always receive much
attention in discussions about segregation, undocumented migrants tend
to live in more segregated
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than those with legal status. As for immigrants who find themselves
caught in the prison system, noncitizens, regardless of legal status,
are often housed in all-foreign jails. As legal scholar Emma Kaufman
has highlighted
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a majority of noncitizens in federal prison—nearly all of whom are
Latinx—are incarcerated in institutions “segregated by
citizenship.” 

Despite the persistence of racial separation, there are two major
institutions that do increasingly mirror national demographics: the
military and the university system. Although the highest-ranking
officers are almost exclusively
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officers in general match the racial demographics of society at large,
and only 57 percent
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active-duty service members are white.

Universities, just like every other major American institution, have a
long way to go, as is underscored by persistent concerns about the
lack of diverse hiring. Still, they have become settings where white
students often engage with minority faculty members and other minority
professionals with institutional authority, as well as with nonwhite
classmates. In 1968, the average white student attended a college that
was only 2.3 percent Black. By 2011, white students on average went to
colleges that were more than 10.2 percent
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And large increases in minority enrollment mean that the current
college student population is almost half
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For many white college students—who may never have had sustained
cross-racial relationships before coming to campus—the university
can be a racially transformative experience. 

Neither the military nor the university system, however, are ideal
sites for left mobilization. The volunteer military, which is
relatively small compared with past periods of conscription,
inculcates cultural practices built on deference and hierarchy. And it
is often a career pathway for veterans into policing and other
security jobs. The military is thus an interracial institutional
space, but, unlike the unruly draft army during Vietnam, it is
fundamentally disconnected from any kind of left-wing insurgency. 

Colleges reach a broad swath of the public. About 40 percent
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the total U.S. population has some type of college degree. But higher
education’s well-documented role in reproducing class status and
intensifying economic inequalities has its own double-edged effects.
Though universities may well facilitate cross-racial alliances, this
version of cross-racial identity often coincides with a presentation
of multicultural America that is favored by corporate conglomerates
and is inaccessible for non-college-educated people. 

The image of the country as depicted by national advertisements—and
much of popular culture—is overwhelmingly one of integrated, highly
educated, and upwardly mobile family and friend groups. No doubt, it
has had its positive effects. For instance, it is not surprising that
people embedded in such a cultural world would find Trump’s racism
and xenophobia distasteful. Advertisements and entertainment have
clearly impacted, for the better, views about everything from
interracial relationships to LGBTQ rights. Yet this overarching vision
hardly reflects the experiences of many on the outside looking in,
whose day-to-day lives and interactions with institutions produce a
very different reality from the one on television. 

Above all, the fact that the university system is perhaps the largest
relatively desegregated institution in American life speaks to a
broader problem. People without college degrees still compose a
substantial majority in society, and whites without a degree make up
nearly 38 percent
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If you are white and do not attend college—against the backdrop of a
greatly reduced union presence—there are limited sites in which you
are likely to have continuous and meaningful interracial interactions.
Simply put, the institutional spaces for building working-class
multiracial identity are vanishingly few. 

If anything, college attendance is now an important component of
contemporary political polarization among white voters. Income has
become a far weaker indicator of whether a white voter will support
Democrats or Republicans than their educational level
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with college-educated white constituents backing Democrats by a
twenty-point margin in 2016 and by a twenty-eight-point margin in
2020. 

An additional driver of the rightward drift of white
non-college-educated voters is neighborhood segregation patterns.
Upwardly mobile, multiracial communities might be emerging today, but
the educational and cultural sorting in these communities means that
they notably do not include poorer white families. Instead, a poorer,
non-college-educated white family may well live beside a wealthier but
also non-college-educated white family in a thoroughly segregated
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Such neighborhoods cut against the idea that poor white families
occupy a common material position with working-class minority ones.
Tom Watson thought that Black and white tenants living next to one
another would strengthen shared class bonds, but that is not how these
neighborhoods have been built. As a result of the long history of
discriminatory practices by both the government and private sector,
along with cycles of white self-isolation, poor white families have
tended to live in segregated neighborhoods more prosperous than those
of even middle-class Black and Latinx families. A study of housing
trends
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1990 and 2009 found that white families with an annual income of just
$13,000 on average lived in neighborhoods where the median income was
$45,000, whereas a Black family with an annual income of $50,000 lived
on average in a neighborhood where the median income was $43,000. 

For white residents in these areas, daily activities—in local
schools, churches, playgrounds, and businesses—reinforce a deep
sense of shared cultural connection. Despite their class divide, rich
and poor white families in such communities feel more common ground
with each other than either would with the university-educated white
progressives who dominate the Democratic Party or with working-class
minority families. 

Notably, rising poverty levels and declines
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markers of neighborhood quality over the past decade in white rural
communities have not unglued these entrenched solidarities. If
anything, the economic breakdown of poor white communities has fed
into a Trumpist rather than a democratic socialist class politics. 

The reasons are numerous. But they involve both a disconnect of rural
whites from Democratic Party narratives
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upward professional mobility and the very real weaknesses of party
policies. As historian Matthew Karp notes of the Obama years,
“Homeowners suffered foreclosure
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Washington bailed out
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Street; health insurance remained ruinously
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far
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universal; inequality rose as fast
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ever.” These elite failures, combined with the broader disappearance
of alternative working-class institutions, meant that rural economic
decline did not lead white constituents to vote their pocketbook. It
simply intensified cultural separation from left and liberal
constituencies.

Lawrence Goodwyn, the historian of the Populist movement, argued that
the goal of left mobilization
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long been to move people out of the “received culture” that shapes
their lives to a “movement culture” that provides energy for
transformative projects. Such projects require more than simply making
arguments about economic interest. They require a cultural
infrastructure, in which left values are present in the everyday
institutions that organize people’s experiences. Without that
infrastructure, it is incredibly hard to shift people’s political
views. Perhaps the greatest challenge democratic socialists face in
building a cross-racial class-based alliance is the lack of access
activists have to the working-class white constituents they seek to
recruit. 

Conventional wisdom tends to depict integration in terms of
educational and material improvements for Black people. But it was
also about transforming white political identity. Indeed, fears about
cross-racial class coalitions were a driving force behind the legal
establishment of segregation in the first place. And, unsurprisingly,
segregation in America persists as a major constraint on the potential
of left politics. 

India Walton’s defeat in the 2021 mayoral race in Buffalo, New York,
exemplifies some of the ways that dynamics around race, class, and
cultural separation impose roadblocks for left expansion, even in
deep-blue settings. Walton’s primary victory highlighted how a
working-class Black candidate pursuing a transformative economic
agenda could succeed in a diverse, overwhelmingly Democratic city. She
ran strong
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neighborhoods
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large Black populations, who responded to her economic message and
lived experience.

After she won the primary, her opponent, incumbent Byron Brown,
refused to leave the race and ran in the general election with a
write-in campaign paid for by wealthy developers. Republicans chose to
back him rather than field their own candidate, causing the electoral
map to shift. Strong white support for Byron, particularly in
wealthier and more conservative neighborhoods, was a key reason for
Walton’s loss.

Perhaps most tellingly, Byron skillfully turned Walton’s
working-class background into a liability, especially in those
communities. In the general election, Brown hammered Walton over
reports that she had unpaid parking tickets and owed back taxes. In
places like the wealthy
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District, which went for Walton in the primary but shifted to Brown in
the general because of non-Democratic voters, his negative
ads—including ones that mischaracterized her police-budget proposal
as entailing extensive layoffs—had a major
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Brown succeeded in presenting Walton’s reforms as a threat to both
law and order and municipal jobs. And he also reframed her personal
history as raising questions about her competence and responsibility,
not as indicative of the perennial challenges facing poor and
working-class people in America. 

The election in Buffalo offered a test case for the hurdles facing
serious socialist candidates running for major offices at the city
level and beyond. Indeed, the dynamics that led to Walton’s defeat
also suggest why we are seeing the broader success of minority
Democrats who are pro-business, conciliatory toward the police, and
deeply critical of the party’s left wing. 

Like white law-and-order politicians of old, these figures—including
Brown, Eric Adams in New York City, and the recently appointed San
Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins—present a democratic
socialist agenda as dangerously radical
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But they do so while combining minority support with the support of
white Democratic constituents, including educated professionals.
Moreover, as embodiments of the party establishment, they are also
likely to maintain traditional union leadership backing. 

Many of Brown’s white supporters were solid Democrats and may well
have supported Walton against a Republican. But having the option of
voting for another Democrat, who notably was also a minority, made a
difference. In a sense, the Obama–Biden coalition suggests a basic
predicament. A working-class and democratic socialist Black candidate
like Walton could produce Black enthusiasm, grounded in shared
struggles and experience, but establishment Black politicians have
built-in advantages and are especially effective at running against
left agendas. To minority audiences, they can tar non-minority leftist
candidates or even campaign workers as outsiders, whose radical
agendas are inconsistent
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the needs of the local community. And for enough white Democrats, they
can present working-class life experiences—like an impounded
car—as real question marks for a Black socialist candidate in ways
that do not code as racist.

For now, leftists who run as Democrats are stuck within a voting
coalition constructed for their mainstream Democratic opponents. At
the national level, efforts to break free from this coalition and
pursue party realignment confront the cultural isolation of left
activists from non-college-educated white constituencies. In the
context of labor’s decline, those constituencies are often
thoroughly insulated within conservative and segregated institutional
spaces. And at the local level, even in deep-blue contexts,
establishment candidates seem better equipped to bind together the
Democratic Party’s multiracial voting blocs. 

These structural impediments are not insurmountable, but they
underscore the driving need for workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods
that sustain a left cultural world. Simply put, there is no shortcut
around the arduous work of rebuilding the institutional spaces that
would give everyday life to movement politics.

Indeed, part of what feeds left malaise today is the implicit wish
behind the Sanders campaigns: the hope that victory could have somehow
unblocked the political process, perhaps even realigned voting
patterns, all without having to undo the cultural and political damage
wrought by the past half-century. In truth, though, this was never a
real possibility. Even with a Sanders presidency, the democratic
socialist left’s capacity to govern effectively—let alone to
entrench a durable majority coalition—would have been severely
limited, as we are witnessing even under Biden. The Constitution’s
anti-democratic dysfunctions, the right’s deepening radicalization,
and the likely extreme reaction against Sanders specifically—from
business interests and the national security and carceral
sectors—all would have generated overwhelming pushback. 

But the fact that the conversation now is about blockage rather than
irrelevance speaks to how dramatically circumstances have changed
since Sanders announced his first presidential run in 2015. Embracing
the left’s emergence—whatever the limitations—means accepting
the unavoidability of political struggle. It means appreciating that
to the extent that the country is now thrown back into history, the
structural sediments that have set in since previous periods of left
vibrancy cannot be wished away but have to be uprooted across a
multitude of fronts.

To start, we need to invest in a full electoral infrastructure, even
while recognizing the disadvantages of the Democratic Party’s
current voting base. That means expanding the number of candidates who
can challenge centrist Democrats at every level and staff every
bureaucratic position in local, state, and federal government. 

It also involves pushing national legislative reforms that reduce the
institutional obstacles to democratic socialist coalition building.
The most obvious area to address is electoral and constitutional
reform, particularly around expanding and equalizing voting rights.
There is notable liberal-left agreement on the need to reform our
distorted, state-based, and gerrymandered framework. 

Along with voting rights, union expansion is the other key national
legislative project that should be prioritized. It is no doubt true
that much of traditional labor leadership, given its embrace of the
Democratic establishment, has tended to be a hindrance rather than an
aid in recent intra-party races. Still, unions remain a central
institution for any large-scale multiracial working-class project and
are critical for reaching rightward-drifting working-class white
voters. 

Unfortunately, unions include only a small percentage of workers in
the United States, and they organize at a severe disadvantage in a
deeply unfriendly legal environment. Moreover, the Democratic
Party’s leadership—regardless of traditional labor support—has
placed unionization on the back burner for decades. This has to be
reversed. Whether through bills
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the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act or other, more
far-reaching endeavors, the legal terrain must be altered to expand
the capacity of workers to join unions and to strike. Labor growth is
a foundational building block for sustained left vibrancy and for
democratic socialist organizing. 

At a moment when voting rights have been blocked in Congress, calling
for further investment in national legislative agendas can feel
futile. But 2022 will not be the only time such laws can be pursued.
And it remains critical to have clarity—even if only for the
future—about how these reform packages can strengthen the practical
power of left movements.

Above all, the long-term goal has to be nothing less than finally
overcoming the segregated nature of American life. Given the
requirements of democratic socialist mobilization, a clear entry point
can be found in those sites that combine issues of segregation with
labor and class politics. Perhaps no institutional setting does this
more explicitly than education. Educational occupations are diverse,
they have the highest rates
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and they were responsible for nearly one in five work stoppages
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last year’s strike wave. 

Schools demonstrate the interrelation between racial and class
hierarchies. Indeed, the current assault on teachers over “critical
race theory” should be read as part of a longstanding
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push to privatize schools—an attack on labor, on the emancipatory
capacities of the state, and on the anti-segregation vision of the
civil rights movement. Privatization efforts allow white families to
opt out of more integrated spaces in favor of self-isolation, and
underscore that conservatives view both teachers and public schools as
cultural and political threats. 

By contrast, in the recent wave of teacher strikes, education workers
have mobilized on behalf of resource redistribution and educational
equality in a way that links anti-segregation and economic demands.
Earlier this year, Minneapolis teachers
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support staff went on strike to demand a range of
improvements—better pay, more overall funding, an increase in the
number of school social workers and counselors, and improved retention
of minority teachers. These changes are aimed at reversing the steady
exit of students and teachers from the public school system by
improving the quality of education and promoting the institution as an
integrated space. 

The push for affordable housing is another way to address economic
grievances while building new multiracial communities. With housing
costs surging, the idea of housing as a public good that should be
broadly available enjoys real popular support. Policies such as
changing zoning laws, increasing tenant rights, and creating community
land trusts all have the potential to transform American
neighborhoods. So, too, would significant collective investment in
public housing, including at the state and local level. We are
beginning to see this latter effort spread
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the country, and it should be dramatically expanded. Taken together,
these initiatives broaden the range of locations where lower-income
families can live, redistribute material resources, and address racial
housing barriers that persist even without explicit segregation
laws. 

Contemporary activism focused on education and housing is also
noteworthy because of how it engages with the history of white
backlash against desegregation in the 1970s and ’80s. Efforts such
as busing were hijacked by conservative opponents and framed as
zero-sum conflicts between white and minority families over who reaps
rewards and who bears burdens. In contrast, teacher strikes today are
often based on the idea of “bargaining for the common good
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with a focus on universal reinvestment to benefit a cross-racial
alliance. Similarly, the push for affordable housing emphasizes
class-based multiracial needs, which have become increasingly
pronounced among working-class white families over the past decade. 

A focus on decriminalizing immigration is another clear arena for
connecting segregation with labor politics. As with the 2006
immigration protests, in which millions mobilized
nationwide—including in enormous May Day events—to change existing
policy, a meaningful immigrant-freedom project could tie together
multiracial coalition building and class-based demands. 

An empowered immigrant community is one that can press both in
workplaces and in politics for a racially and economically
reconstructive agenda. Indeed, making good on immigrant rights has the
real potential to counter right-wing appeals to Latinx voters, by
emphasizing the viability of democratic socialist mobilizing.
Furthermore, rights expansion for immigrants almost inevitably pushes
back against the type of racial separation often experienced by
undocumented people in particular. 

But here we find a chicken-and-egg problem not unlike the one faced by
desegregation efforts in the 1970s. In that setting, greater
desegregation would have built trust and solidarity across
communities, further deepening coalition building. But the success of
an integration process seemed to require that very trust and
solidarity in the first place. Similarly, there is a reason that Biden
has deferred to key aspects of Trump’s draconian border policies.
Although general views of immigrants have improved in recent years
(partly in reaction to Trump’s odiousness), there is little to no
political will—even among Democrats—for transformative goals such
as systematic decriminalization and noncitizen voting. These policies
would have huge power-building effects for left coalitions, but their
prospects are undermined by the realities of our received culture, to
use Goodwyn’s term. 

Immigration thus highlights a long-standing American predicament, one
that also links the Jim Crow past to today: how do you get a majority
within a polity—including insiders who enjoy material and status
benefits from the subordination of outsiders—to alter the terms of
who is seen as part of that very community? 

There are no simple answers. But a key part of the solution is for
more and more Americans to come to believe that the problems they face
can be overcome only by embracing equal and effective freedom for all,
including for those on the margins. For this to occur, individuals
must, on a day-to-day basis, inhabit institutions that promote
cross-group solidarity and exchange. Thus, building these sites,
however slow and piecemeal the process, is the essential cultural
precondition to having some insiders embrace—out of material and,
eventually, moral commitments—new and richer forms of community.

Leftists today are struggling to break out of a binary that
increasingly defines American life. On one hand, right-wing
politicians offer a warped version of class politics, particularly for
white non-college-educated voters, by combining racial solidarity and
xenophobia with populist attacks on “elites.” On the other hand,
we have a multiracial liberalism, but one that largely fails to
provide a culturally meaningful account of working-class identity,
interests, and community. 

 Education, housing, and immigration policies are just three possible
levers to escape the governing binary. They are good on their own
terms, as ways of improving working people’s lives. But they also
provide tools for recalibrating the nature of American cultural life.
Steady and hard-won changes to schools and housing could transform the
type of shared worlds people inhabit, in ways that make the received
culture easier to dislodge.

Given the present dynamics, the old 1930s Popular Front
coalition—overwhelmingly working class—may well be off the table
for the left, at least for the foreseeable future. The institutional
legacy of decades of left dormancy constrain any efforts to
fundamentally reorient the Democratic Party’s voting base, or to
fully reclaim white non-college-educated constituents. 

But an integrated world in which an emancipatory version of class
politics could resonate more broadly can and must be pursued. It may
produce a tense grafting onto the existing Democratic coalition.
Again, this is because such efforts effectively aim to add
working-class white support, and class-conscious political identity,
to a party frame built more or less around a story of multiracial
upward mobility and meritocratic
[[link removed]] achievement.
These two approaches sit uneasily together, but seeking to expand
rather than replace the existing Democratic coalition for now remains
the political pathway. 

The end of Tom Watson’s story is a profoundly dispiriting one. In
the wake of the Populist Party’s defeat, Watson eventually blamed
Black people for the collapse of interracial solidarity. By 1920, he
had rejoined the Democratic Party and been elected to the Senate. He
became a notorious hate-monger, supporting nativist, anti-Semitic, and
white-supremacist politics. Nothing better illustrates this turn of
events than Watson’s use of his newspaper to help spur the lynching
of Leo Frank, a Jewish man framed for the murder of thirteen-year-old
factory girl Mary Phagan. 

Watson’s biography embodies the tragic swing this country has so
frequently taken from the hope of multiracial democracy to the extreme
retrenchment of white solidarity and class hierarchy. But history is
not destiny, even if one must be clear-eyed about the structural
obstacles in the path of any transformative project. 

Perhaps the hardest feature of our moment is the pervasive sense of
incompatible time horizons. There is a need to address immediate
crises and impending political disasters (including the specter of
Trump’s return), while the work of left institution-building may
require decades. But that tension is written into the long-standing
advantages that received cultures almost always have over movement
ones. It is an expression of the uneven terrain that American efforts
at radical change have routinely confronted. And, like our left
predecessors, we need forthrightness and courage to face down the
roadblocks to a future we demand but cannot guarantee. 

_AZIZ RANA teaches law at Cornell University and is the author
of The Two Faces of American Freedom._

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