And on one level I can understand the scapegoating because Gore was a flawed candidate, they didn't want to admit he was a flawed candidate so they blamed it on Ralph, but what really made the greatest impression on me was that hostility and anger and sense of betrayal that the Gore supporters and the democrats displayed at the very thought that any left of center voter would do anything other than vote for any democrat.
Which is to say they never bothered to ask, well why don't we offer these left of center voters something and it was a sense of fundamentally anti-democratic sense of entitlement on the part of the democrats to every left of center vote in America without having an incumbent obligation to offer anything to the left. Does that make sense?
R.K.: Yes. Now you say in your article, the desiccated leftism, capable only of counting parcels, hand-wringing, administering and making up just-so stories about this possession and exploitation recast in the evocative but politically sterile language of disparity and diversity. This is neo-liberalism version of a left. Radicalism now means only a very strong commitment to anti-discrimination, a point from which democratic liberalism has not retreated. Rather, it's the path democrats have taken in retreating from a commitment to economic justice.
So, you've got anti-discrimination versus economic justice. What's the difference?
A.R.: I want to make clear, too because I think this is another kind of point that sends a lot of people out of their trees or rattling their cages because they want to read it as my claiming or my dismissing the importance of anti-discrimination or suggesting that there's not a need for it. That's not at all true.
But I think what happens, so, I'll start out with the notion of disparity. Most of the academic literature as well as the popular journalism now about framing apparent inequalities according to race or gender in particular takes the form of objection to disproportionate representation of either women or non-whites, disproportionately high in the distribution of bad stuff in the society and disproportionately low in the distribution of good stuff in society. And that's really what disparity means.
So what's the alternative to disparity? Well, the alternative to disparity is parity. And what does parity mean? This takes us back to the point we were discussing earlier. What parity means is that across the board in the distribution of goods and bads, your non-whites and women, or your gays and lesbians where it's appropriate, should show up in percentages that are roughly equivalent to their percentages in their overall population.
And once again, that is yes, that's one measure of equality as the outcome of equality of opportunity or as a reasonably predictable outcome of equality of opportunity, but it's equality of opportunity that takes for granted the larger economic context that determines the overall pattern of the distribution of goods and bads. It's back to the billionaires again. The billionaires and the homeless.
And my argument is that to the extent that public complaint, organized complaint, about inequality takes the form of complaining about statistical disparities. Then it takes for granted the surrounding economic framework. I mean the political economic framework and the framework of economic policy that accepts stuff like the trade agreements and all the rest of that.
And from that perspective, I mean, you can almost see it as like the equivalent of a meteorite that's hurtling towards the sun and people on the meteorite focus on how their patterns are arranged among themselves as they're hurtling towards the sun. So it's not that how the level of inequality that pertains among them at the group level is irrelevant.
But as you move closer and closer towards the sun, things are getting worse and worse for everybody and you have got to have a way... I feel it's a tortured analogy, but to put it a little more plainly, if the larger economic forces that both parties accept are working to drive greater and greater percentages of people in the society to the depths of economic and personal insecurity then it doesn't mean, not only does it not mean a whole lot, but there should be more black and female, or there should be black and female billionaires or gazillionaires at the same rates that there are whites one, but what it also means in very practical terms that you don't have the basis for uniting a broad enough compliment of the population to create the kind of bottom up movement that is necessary to change the larger pattern. Or for that matter change the smaller pattern.
R.K.: In a sense it sounds like what you're saying is that when you ignore the economic justice and go with anti-discrimination you're hollowing out the movement.
A.R.: You absolutely are. And I think the ironic thing about it is that the only way effectively to challenge even the patterns of inequality that fit within the framework of anti-discrimination is to do so from the standpoint of a social movement that is broad enough to push for a better world for everybody.
And this is something actually that all kinds of leftists understood in like the 1940's and the 1950's. A. Philip Randolph and people like that were very clear even into the 60's that civil rights struggle for black Americans had to hinge on the existence of a vibrant public sector and a vibrant trade union movement for practical reasons and that's been lost. That's been forgotten.
R.K.: Okay. So we've covered a lot of ground. I wanted to cover two more areas.
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