And, as Reyes makes clear, the worst effects of all that fell on people of color:
the public image of "racial progress" touted by the Democratic Party generally and Black and Latino politicians in particular runs up against a brutally grim reality. "[T]he racial wealth gap today is far worse than it was 30 years ago: "Black and Latino communities lost between 30% and 40% of their wealth in the late 2000s; "median Black household wealth is less than 7% that of white household wealth; and "if you are a single woman of color your median total wealth is a grand total of five dollars!
Five dollars?! Hey, that may be five too many. According to the Institute for Policy Studies: "if the racial wealth divide is left unaddressed, median Black household wealth is on a path to hit zero by 2053 and median Latino household wealth is projected to hit zero twenty years later."
So the advances of neo-liberal identity-politics developed concomitantly with neo-liberal socio-economic assaults on the multiracial working class, which inevitably had worse effects on Black and Latino workers. Per Reyes, it transformed "larger and larger portions of these communities" into 'surplus populations' with little or no relation to the increasingly financialized global economy, and contained by swelling police forces and disproportionally warehoused in the prison system."
Thus, the neo-liberal representational victories do not at all disprove Adolph Reed's point above. Through the relentless political and ideological work of the ruling class, these victories were won, not as victories of the "left," but of "the left-wing of neoliberalism." They are not the opposite, but the obverse, of the complete absence of any truly radical left as a "politically effective force."
All of this, as Reyes remarks, was abetted by the "strange marriage between Black and Latino politicians and the neoliberal agenda dominant within the Democratic Party," and there was no "left" in or out of that me'nage that was capable of offering any effective resistance.
In situations like Charlottesville, we have to recognize that it's municipal governments, into which those identity elites have been integrated, and which in no way threaten ruling-class interests, that have and are using the power to do things like removing Confederate statues, even in "red" ex-Confederate states.
In this regard, antifa is operating in domains where what the right calls the "left" (neo-liberal identity-politics) is operating from a position of relative strength and established power. Thus, with gleeful schadenfreude the alt-right mocks the identity-politics left as the establishment (which it is part of), and presents itself as the edgy, rebellious insurgency--as in the specious but discomfiting video rant where Paul Joseph Watson insists, presenting Johnny Rotten in support, that "conservatism is the new counterculture and populism is the new punk." (Watson, like many leftists today, seems to presume populism must be right-wing.)
The socialist left may have no political victories that have reversed the onslaught of material harm being done to the multiracial working class, but the neo-liberal identity-politics "left" won the American culture wars, not the racist right. That's precisely what infuriates the alt-right (defined as a frankly racist and/or incipiently fascist movement) and what it is trying to change.
The new "alt-right" is operating from a position of weakness, and is furiously trying to gin up a counterattack--a kind of culture war Battle of the Bulge--by white people in an effort to revive retrograde social attitudes that have been thoroughly discredited.
It's disingenuous to deny this. As Lee Jones put it: "When everyone from Mitt Romney to Bernie Sanders agrees with you, you are kicking at an open door." Jones also reminds us of the historical trajectory:
The membership of vile organisations like the Ku Klux Klan has collapsed, from a peak of three to six million in the 1920s to around 6,000 today. Only 10 percent of the US public admit to supporting the "alt right" (only 4 percent "strongly"), while 83 percent say it is "unacceptable to hold neo-Nazi or white supremacist views". Too high and not high enough, one might say. But the fact is that the far-right is a lunatic fringe.
And Reyes
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