et’s forget about the family. It’s one o f those concepts the left has been harping on for some time, without getting any where. I’m proposing a list o f such terms that, as far as I’m concerned, the right can have.
My main group o f what we might call negative keywords in cludes the following: “ family,” “ community,” “ neighborhood,” “ grassroots,” “ empowerment,” “ the people.”
“ Family” heads the list because it is both the most seductive and the most insidious. T he seductiveness makes sense— after all, who actually opposes the idea o f family? We’re all aware that the right looks to demonize us as a fringe element o f freaks, alien from and hostile to the values of a supposed mainstream. Pointing out that we have families counters the image o f the left as rootless kooks or de mons. So the temptation to try to “ take the family back” from the conservatives is powerful.
T he desire to make a left program symbolically consonant with “ ordinary” Americans’ attitudes isn’t new. It’s what prompted East ern European immigrant Communists in the 1920s and 1930s to adopt “American” surnames. It also has undergirded a lot of sectar ian groups’ fetishes for stereotypes o f working-class behavior— beer-drinking, homophobic, macho style. And, as comes through most clearly among defectors from the Democratic Party’s liberal wing, it’s a slippery slope.
There are two main problems with the “ take back the family” stratagem. First, the “ family” in American political debate still means the patriarchal, nuclear household. So we must load cum bersome qualifications onto family imagery. We have to point out, for instance, that by “ family” we mean any set o f individuals who understand themselves to be committed to one another in a pri mary, durable way. We have to do that, rightly, to make clear that we don’t want to diminish the legitimacy of a wide variety o f nonhet erosexual, nonnuclear household arrangements.
It’s certainly necessary to combat the use o f family rhetoric, which the right uses as a weapon against anyone who doesn’t con-
form to conservative patriarchal ideals. Contesting for ownership of a label whose popular usage is saturated with evocations o f a nar row, conservative moralism, however, is not obviously the most ef fective way to battle. T h e real issue, after all, isn’ t whether “ families,” by whatever reckoning, are suffering or being under mined by rightwing policy initiatives. It’s that the right’s program impoverishes and otherwise endangers large numbers o f indi viduals— without regard to their household arrangements and pat terns o f intimate attachment.
A simpler, more direct approach is to point out that the thrust of a progressive, egalitarian policy agenda is to make certain that indi viduals have access to the resources— among other things, decent education, health care, a safe environment, a living wage, freedom from discrimination— that they need to realize their capacities as autonomous members o f the society. Under those conditions, the family issue will largely take care of itself. Autonomous individuals can choose whatever dom estic arrangements they w ish, with whichever specific partners they wish, free from the sting o f bigotry or the lash of the market.
T he best single “ family policy” would be to end wage discrimi nation and labor-market segmentation by race and gender. Only when women are free, without fear o f impoverishment, to order their intimate lives as they choose on an equal basis with men will we have a sense o f what a “ natural” family form might be for our society. This is also a key component o f the struggle against domestic violence.
Charles Murray and other reactionary bemoaners of the demise o f “ the family” know what’s up. T hey object forthrightly to the sys tem o f social support— not just social welfare spending, but even housing patterns that make smaller units available, thereby reduc ing the cost o f living alone— that makes it possible for women to live independently. T hey recognize, in principle at least, that Engels knew what he was talking about in the late nineteenth century; that the economic and political subordination o f women is the sine qua
non o f the sacrosanct nuclear family as we know it.
This connects with the second disturbing feature o f the “ take back the family” strategy. It often masks a fundamentally left-in
K i s s the Family Good-b y e—115
form, right-in-essence acceptance o f conservative family ideology. I’ve learned from responses to my criticisms o f underclass ideology in The Progressive and The Nation that all too many people who identify with the left nonetheless maintain blind spots about the in trinsic superiority o f the two-parent, “ intact” nuclear form o f household organization.
Jacqueline Jones’s well-intentioned book, The Dispossessed, is a clear example o f how a misty-eyed concern for family can produce blindness to the abusive and exploitive relations that frequently characterize real families. This blindness is also why Williamjulius Wilson’s silly idea that we should direct employment programs to inner-city men to make them “ marriageable” (his macroeconomic dating service) hasn’t ruffled more feathers on the left, despite its blatantly anti-feminist premise that women should marry their way out o f poverty.
“ Family” has the aura of a natural relation that occurs outside the system o f hierarchies associated with a particular social division of labor. But what we tend to reify— even to the extent o f imputing it to other animals— as T he Family is more usefully and accurately seen by anthropologists as only one o f a very large variety of actually functioning kinship and household systems.
“ Community,” “ neighborhood,” “ grassroots,” and “ the people” work the same way. Like “ family,” these notions appeal partly as a counter to the right’s charges that we’re marginal. Each is suppos edly popular, authentic, collective, and organic. Each appeals to the image o f a group that exists apart from— and prior to— external identities and interests, including larger institutions like govern ment. Each is construed as a direct pipeline to the general will. In voking the community, the neighborhood, the grassroots, or the people is a self-contained political justification.
There are at least two other problems with this view as well. One is that each of the four categories is too neat an abstraction. There is no pure, organic solidarity. Communities and neighborhoods are not pristine with respect to their alliances, nor are they joined by general will. Each category (really four versions of the same cat- egory) exists at best as what Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg
Lukacs in his 1923 book, History and Class Consciousness, de scribed as a unit o f “ objective historical possibility.” It is invoked as part o f an attempt to create it, as part o f the effort associated with generating constituencies for specific political interpretations and programs.
Communities and neighborhoods are sites o f political disagree ment and contest just like every place else: “ the grassroots” and “ the people” are only more abstract and diffuse forms o f the same imag ery. They aren’t pure, and they don’t act with one mind. Their po litical affiliations are defined by the same kinds o f struggles and negotiated meanings that occur in households, workplaces, co-ops, union locals, or editorial boards.
T he disposition to appeal to that imagery for political validation reflects a naive, Jeffersonian romanticism that equates smallness and informality with democracy and justice. And that’s the second problem with this imagery.
Presumption o f that kind o f organic collectivity as the font o f political legitimacy is a double-edged sword. Ever since the anti abolitionist riots in the Jacksonian era, racist whites have justified their exclusionist, anti-egalitarian politics in terms o f appeal to the collective will o f “ the community,” “ the neighborhood,” “ the grassroots,” and “ the people.” In fact, this rhetoric has been a staple among those seeking to promote all manner of illiberal and repres sive agendas.
As anyone who has lived in a small town knows, the small com munity can be ruthlessly oppressive for those defined as outsiders, and internal democracy is by no means necessarily the norm for establishing the “ community’s” dominant points of view. Think o f the Jim Crow South.
“ Empowerment,” like the other negative keywords, speaks more o f process than o f program. This notion is perhaps the emp tiest o f them all, as the ease with which the Reaganauts appropriated it attests. It covers the waterfront: from self-help psychobabble to bootstrap alternatives to public action, to vague evocations o f po litical mobilization. It’s currently particularly seductive because its vagueness provides an apparent basis for broad agreement.
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T h e allure o f these symbols points to serious conceptual prob lems among progressives, w ho— especially in this perilous time— must think more clearly. Philanthropic foundations now routinely promote community “ leaders” whose appeal rests almost entirely on clever deployment o f a rhetoric driven by these keywords. Their substantive programs typically reduce to bootstrap economic de velopment, victim-blaming, corporate-partnership stuff. Surpris ingly, many progressives have shown themselves incapable o f looking beyond such patter about empowering the grassroots, mo bilizing at the community and neighborhood levels, and so on.
Our response as leftists to such rhetoric should always be to ask. “ Empowering whom? T o do what? Mobilize which communities in support o f what programs?”
Least of all now can we afford to become victimized by our own propaganda or to fall prey to wish fulfillment. Our politics must al ways proceed from a clear-headed analysis o f substantive programs and a determination of who benefits and loses from them.
O f course, we invoke those contested symbols in our propa ganda as do all other interested forces in the society (though I am convinced that “ family” in particular is at best a dead end), but we must be clear that they are rhetorical, not analytical, categories. T hey help us advance and sell a vision and program; they don’t define, clarify, or substitute for them.
A final irony about these counterproductive keywords is that their attractiveness stems from our own sense that we are fundamen tally alien from the American population, that our politics can be validated only by showing that we have support from supposedly more authentic, popular constituencies.
There’s a subtly anti-democratic undercurrent to this view. It amounts to defining ourselves as outside the political culture, and it feeds a reluctance to be forthcoming and direct about our politics with others. This is an understandable reflex, given the isolated and demoralizing position we’re in (which also leads to flights into irrationalism and the make-your-own, virtual world of “ cultural politics” ). It’s a variation o f liberals’ current ideas about slipping decent social policy past the electorate by dressing it up in different rhetorical clothes.
As any decent organizer knows, however, such stratagems inevi tably backfire. People can sense that they’re being sold a bill o f goods, and the result is a further discrediting o f the left. Our only hope is to hold firmly and self-confidently to our politics, approach others as equal citizens, and stand or fall on the strength of our analysis and practice.
We have to recognize that we are the people as much as anyone else. Our job is to propagate our vision of how the world should be, reshaping the vision (and in the same process, the world) along with those who join us. That’s what a progressive, democratic politics looks like.