On 11/3/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
We've all said or heard criticisms of the Democratic Party. I'd like
some things that are a little different.
* An overview of the process that led to the emergence of the Liberty
Party, the Free Soil Party, and eventually the Republican Party in the
19th century, and the rise and fall of the Populist Movement, with a
view to drawing lessons from both processes for the benefit of those
who want to overcome the Democratic and Republican Parties.
I would just like to mention "The Rise and Fall of the White Republic"
by Alexander Saxton. Below is a review by Kiyohiko Murayama that
appeared in the African American Review, Summer, 2004.
Alexander Saxton. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class
Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. London:
Verso, 2003. 2nd ed. 415 pp. $23.00.
What Alexander Saxton grapples with in this book is one of the most
puzzling questions in American history: namely, why the United States,
a country proudly founded on democratic principles, has long since
suffered the persistence of such an obviously undemocratic condition
as racial inequality. The key to answering this question is provided
here by an exploration of the course taken by the ideology of white
racial superiority in the cultural as well as political arena of
nineteenth-century American society.
"Introduction: Historical Explanations of Racial Inequality" lucidly
expounds the scope and value of this project. In search of "a set of
plausible and economical explanations for known developments, which
[he] "take[s] to be the closest one can come to demonstrating
causality in history," Saxton takes great pains to avoid the familiar
proclivity to circular argument in the previous explanatory
strategies. As his analysis shows, Gunnar Myrdal's and Ashley
Montagu's arguments, for example, might be said to be circular in that
they boil down practically to the view that racism came into existence
as a result of racism. While, upon concise examination of some causal
explanations of racism such as economic, psychological, and
ideological approaches, he concludes, "the ideological appears the
most promising," Saxton is rightfully wary of an ideological
interpretation stripped of most of its class linkages. According to
his diagnosis, ideological explanation was suppressed in Cold War
America, and even later remained debilitated due to the lack of class
analyses. Ideological investigations without accounts of class
politics are doomed to circularity. In view of such a quandary, Saxton
seeks "an ideological explanation for the initial act of differential
treatment that does not invoke racism or any variant under some other
name as a causal factor."
Another problem for historical explanation is the continuity of racism
in American history: why and how it has lasted for more than three
centuries through shifts of ruling class power. Since it could not
have been the same all the time from the beginning to the present, its
modification and readjustment through the changing formations of
American society must be traced at length. Moreover, its changes could
not have been the product of natural evolution. So many people exerted
their originality and ingenuity to adapt racial discourses for the
emerging necessities of each era. Each sfage brought out its own new
adaptations and inventions that were the products of efforts to cope
with new situations in class politics. By illuminating the relation of
ideological innovations at each stage to the needs of dominant groups
in the changing class coalitions that have ruled the nation, Saxton
manages to shun circularity.
In this book's formulation, ideological innovators are considered
contributors to the enterprise by a particular class that sought to
achieve hegemony. Since hegemony, a concept borrowed from Antonio
Gramsci, implies a much broader range than the older notion of
ideology, the scope of examination in this book is vast, including
literature and art as well as socialization, education, and political
debate.
The framework of the book, however, is constructed upon a descriptive
history of the rise and fall of political parties. It is small wonder
that the book deals primarily with the speeches and writings of
political leaders. In delineating the basic movement in the politics
of nineteenth-century America, the terms of dialectics are used:
National Republican thesis, Jacksonian antithesis, and Republican
synthesis. The three-term sequence governs the structure of this study
so felicitously that the tripartite organization of the book helps the
reader frame an overview of the nineteenth-century history of the
United States. Though this terminology might give the impression that
the formulation should be under the spell of the grand Hegelian
design, it is actually free from such a restraint. As the author takes
pains to note, this method of argument is employed here in order to
trace the process that "developed not automatically but within a
shaping matrix of historical continuities, which remained contingent
to, yet prior to and independent of, that sequence."
Elucidating the interaction of such historical events as territorial
expansion, industrialization, and immigration, among others, Saxton
reveals what was needed for the ruling power to retain hegemony.
Speaking for a coalition of landholding and commercial affluence,
National Republicanism leading to the Whig party, for instance,
resulted in anti-Indian racism whether "soft racial policies" were
preferred or not. Rivaling the Jacksonian Democrats in the power
struggle, it was compelled to abandon the politics of deference, vying
for popular support indispensable for party politics and co-opting
David Crockett as their popular hero. The Democrats in turn strove for
the alliance of urban working people with the planter interest in the
South. As the power structure invariably found it necessary to build a
class coalition, the class politics of each stage ended up with a
newly adjusted system for the exclusion of people of color from Native
Americans to African Americans to Mexicans and Chinese.
--
Sandwichman
