Difference, Solidarity, and Redistribution in Twenty-First Century America

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel presents work from the Social Science Research Council’s project on “Anxieties of Democracy,” focused on difference, democracy, and redistribution in the United States. The papers show how the stable identities and alliances of the postwar era gave way to a jumble of social cleavages and political rifts that now set the menu for politics. They reveal that the trend toward disaggregation in the late twentieth century, which historian Daniel Rogers (2011) called “the age of fracture,” has continued apace. Instead of sweeping away class divides, however, political fragmentation has, if anything, deepened inequalities and rendered them more multifaceted. Fueled by fear and energized by the appeal of narrowly-defined protections, the politics of fracture makes it difficult to address economic and social insecurity in broad and inclusive ways. Instead, a pervasive sense of insecurity has created fertile ground for populist politicians pushing politics toward ugly extremes once thought banished from public life. The paper by Alice Kessler-Harris shows how the women’s movement’s initial concern with social transformation and caring gave way to a search for liberty and equality of opportunity for individuals and groups, in the process dividing the movement along paths that echoed racial and class tensions; Kris-Stella Trump examines why increasing income inequality has not led to more demands for redistribution, assessing the public opinion literature on information about inequality and highlighting the role of deservingness and racial stereotypes in limiting demands for redistribution; Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that three developments—the retrenchment of private provision, the resurgent impact of racial resentment, and the radicalization of the GOP—are essential to grasping not just how America insecurity arose but also whether it might be addressed. Andra Gillespie examines the role of nostalgia in the 2016 election. But nostalgia, she shows, reflects a tunnel-vision of the past, incorporating only the perspective of those who feel their social dominance challenged. At the heart of that challenge lie perceived shifts in the racial hierarchy

Sub Unit

• Theme Panel

Individual Presentations

• Race, Remembrance and Precarity: Nostalgia and Vote Choice in 2016 - Andra Gillespie, Emory University

• Engendering Democracy in an Age of Anxiety - Alice Kessler-Harris, Columbia University

• Public Opinion and Reactions to Increasing Income Inequality - Kris-Stella Trump, University of Memphis

• The Peculiar Politics of American Insecurity - Jacob S. Hacker, Yale University; Paul Pierson, University of California, Berkeley

Chair

• Margaret Weir Brown University

Discussant

• Desmond King University of Oxford