Wrong for All the Right Reasons: How White Liberals Have Been Undone by Race - Hardcover

Macinnes, Gordon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814755437 ISBN 13: 9780814755433

Publisher: NYU Press, 1996

Synopsis

There was a time, in this century, when liberals championed the working class, when Democrats were indisputably the party of those who worked rather than invested for a living. Today, however, most Americans have come to see liberals as drifting and aimless, somehow lacking in backbone and moral fiber, beholden to radical ideologies that have little to do with the average American's life. Few incidents cast this phenomenon into greater relief than George Bush's successful tarring of Michael Dukakis as a liberal in 1988--and, tellingly, Dukakis's subsequent flight from the liberal tradition.

How has it come to this? Why have liberals allowed themselves to be so portrayed? In this book, Gordon MacInnes--state senator, fiscal conservative, frustrated Democrat, and a man who believes deeply in America's civic culture--reveals how progressive forces have retreated from the battle of ideas, at great cost. Squarely at the nexus of race, poverty, and politics, Wrong for All the Right Reasons charts the sources of liberal decline and the high costs of conservative rule.

Tracing the origins of the liberal retreat to the fall-out over Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on the black family in the 1960s, MacInnes claims that white liberals have somewhere along the way stopped taking black people seriously enough to argue with them. Continuously put on the desfensive, liberals have been unable to forge an aggressive, proactive agenda of that addresses the needs of working-class and poor Americans. This has led to a breakdown of honest dialogue which to this day continues to plague liberal Democrats, as evidenced by Bill Bradley's withdrawal from active party politics last fall.

Finding room for optimism in the groundswell of grass-roots progressivism, Wrong for All the Right Reasons is a timely, necessary call to arms for liberal, progressive Democrats, outlining ways in which they can reverse their party's dangerous decline.

About this title

About the Author:

Involved in politics, anti-poverty programs and public and civic life for over 30 years, Gordon MacInnes is currently a state senator from New Jersey.

From Booklist:

Bolick and MacInnes--a supposed right-winger and a supposed left-winger--agree on some very important matters. Both find that affirmative action has failed as a weapon against black poverty; it has made available more opportunities to those prepared to seize them but has not increased the number of persons so prepared, because it does not--was not intended to--address bad schools and crime, which disproportionately hamper poor blacks. Both believe that politicians betrayed the vision of a color-blind society that animated the civil-rights movement by establishing racial preferences in hiring and school admissions. They differ, however, in their explanations of why this happened and their ideas for setting things right.

Bolick, who is actually libertarian rather than conservative, attributes the betrayal to an overweening federal government run by overconfident social engineers. An attorney who works with minority and poor clients to effect school choice and economic liberty (achieved by tearing down regulatory barriers to low-capital enterprises), he advocates empowering the poor by advancing those policies, whether or not affirmative action continues, and he is substantive and persuasive about them. He also urges better violent crime control, welfare reform, and increasing home ownership. Furthermore, his avoidance of partisan sniping (he rounds on the Clinton administration as "the most quota-driven in history" but also devotes a chapter to "The Republican Abdication" ) lends his entire argument cogency.

Until he descends into splenetic anticonservativism in the second half of his book, MacInnes is even more compelling. The New Jersey Democrat, currently a state senator, devotes several enthralling chapters to analyzing racial politics since the 1950s. He maintains that, out of condescension and fear, Democrats betrayed the color-blind society by failing to argue with radicals about either racially preferential policies or radical excuses (e.g., "black rage" ) for violence. That has made Democrats generally seem and often actually be soft on crime, unwilling to reform welfare and other policies when they go awry, and inimical to free market forces. To remedy both the Democrats' woes and the nation's racial problems, progressives (MacInnes rejects the term liberal as politically and morally bankrupt) must regain power. To guide such a comeback, MacInnes sets forth eight policy principles reminiscent of the "New Democrat" stuff candidate Clinton ran on but President Clinton has been perceived as having abandoned--which does not make them bad. Not at all. Ray Olson

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0814755437
• ISBN 13: 9780814755433
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 254