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

Gordon Macinnes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1996

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A veteran foundation official and civic activist in New Jersey, MacInnes, now a state senator there, drubs fellow Democrats for what he considers their embrace of balkanized identity politics, their emphasis on welfare rights over full employment and their acceptance of excuses for unwed motherhood and black crime. His wide-ranging historical account is insistent if not terribly original or fully convincing. While other commentators have made similar arguments, MacInnes's book is useful for his "progressive" (he now considers the term "liberal" a pejorative) faith in government and his recognition that "education and class-not race, language, or religion-are the real dividers in American society." So he supports public investment (schools, libraries) more than "antipoverty" programs, recognizes that welfare reform requires increased spending and suggests we must think long-term and accept small victories in the fight against urban poverty. Progressives, he believes, must abandon racial preferences-thus requiring black progressives to make greater compromises than white ones.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 236 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press; Ex-library edition (February 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814755437
• ISBN-13: 978-0814755433
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,692,450 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Wrong for most of the wrong reasons, June 15, 1998

By 

Matthew Budman - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wrong for All the Right Reasons: How White Liberals Have Been Undone by Race (Hardcover)

Give contentious state Sen. Gordon MacInnes credit for tackling the country's most vexing issue head-on. But not too much credit. While his diagnosis of how race drove Democrats' fall from mid-'60s power seems basically on-target - if overly harsh toward activists and thinkers whose ideas and proposals were compromised by changing attitudes and social conditions - his prescription becomes less and less convincing as it goes on. The conclusion reveals the book to be useful primarily as an example of how even very bright people become muddled when considering the subject of race.

The first part of "Wrong" is valuable: MacInnes details every misguided move made by post-JFK liberal intellectuals and politicians: ignoring the 1965 Moynihan report, which singled out black illegitimacy as a cause of future urban unrest; accepting the McGovern handout of "specially tailored rights" for virtually everyone; moving from "clearly opposing crime and civil disorder" to " excusing black crime and rioting as an understandable reaction to a history of oppression and discrimination." But his focus is on perception, not reality, and his goal for the Democratic Party appears not so much to solve America's race problems as to convince white swing voters that Democrats care about them - not blacks. Rather than changing people's minds - in this case the admittedly narrow, even racist, views of white swing voters - he advocates sanding down the party's stances to suit those prejudices. MacInnes - from Morris County, N.J., "one of the most Republican places on earth" - is tired of minority-party status, and he's more than willing to trade longstanding Democratic ideals for the votes of resentful whites. Rather than try to convince the "radical middle" why their true home is the Democratic Party, he'd prefer to abandon its traditional electoral base and go for the swing vote.

He'd rather switch than fight.

Dubbing the word *liberal* "a political pejorative," MacInnes goes so far as to name the Democrats' race-based fol! lies "the Liberal Misadventure." The villains of his story are not African-Americans but "the liberals who obligingly shut up about ghetto problems, who patronized the ideas of vocal blacks solely because of their color." After the 1964 presidential election, in which all but a handful of African-Americans deserted the GOP, liberals began focusing on the interests of its least empowered; it became "the party of the poor, the dispossessed, the homeless, the disabled." Therefore, since 1964, the Democratic Party has steadily lost "the votes of white suburbanites." And, MacInnes says, it can't have both. "If . . . progressives emphasize bailing out society's most troubled members," he writes, "they squander the chance to incorporate increasingly anxious working- and middle-class white Americans into the coalition."

Here he moves toward - but never reaches - the Democrats' real coalition-building problem: Since segregationist Dixiecrats left the party after 1964, Democrats have never effectively made the case that the interests of black ghetto-dwellers and the white middle class have much in common, while Republicans have done all they can to drive a wedge between the two. "Before they can rebuild a political majority, progressives must both shore up their coalition and come up with an answer to restoring the American dream," MacInnes writes. But he proposes abandoning, not "shoring up," the Democrats' most reliable voters.

Throughout "Wrong for All the Right Reasons," MacInnes doesn't seem to sense the disconnect between his beliefs and his realpolitik political instincts. "No matter what terms are used, politically it makes sense to emphasize equal opportunity and integration," he writes. He understands full well, though, that this rhetoric is to be meant only theoretically: "Make no mistake: as soon as someone proposes specific ways and means for the ideals of equal opportunity and integration to come alive for black Americans, white American enthusiasm flags, quickly and precipitously." So here's what ! MacInnes appears to be recommending: As Republicans have always done, make appropriate "equal opportunity" noises but don't actually *do* anything about it, lest white Americans run screaming.

And yet, for a moderate Democrat in an anti-affirmative-action era, MacInnes is surprisingly wishy-washy on the topic, trying to have it both ways. He insists that remedial programs should be organized around "misfortune, disadvantage, and poverty . . . not race or ethnicity." "Progressives," he writes, "must be clear about the implications of race preferences: they so strongly counter the fundamental beliefs of American society that they should be opposed" - but here's the catch - "except in cases of persistent discrimination where temporary preferences are the only solution."

In the end, MacInnes actually advocates government involvement in private business. "Employers should be required to demonstrate that they had included women and minority candidates in their search, and that there are acceptable explanations for disproportionately low representation." This, Senator, is called affirmative action. And for employers who fall short? "Court-administered quota plans appear to be the only remedy," writes MacInnes, who angrily rejects the term "liberal" but apparently has no problem with "quotas."

What lessons should the Left take from "Wrong"? For the benefit of white Americans, speak to blacks in harsh tones, criticize them, make it clear that Democrats don't need them. But continue everything pretty much as before. Actually, it's unclear whether MacInnes is advocating the misleading of white Americans as to the Democratic Party's beliefs - which ill serves the cause of open debate - or advocating the jettisoning of its least empowered voters. Maybe both. Either way, his naked pandering for the votes of Perotistas doesn't speak well for the cause of sticking by one's beliefs. And remarks like "Democrats do not need to prove again that they care about poor people" bespeak a callousness that is antithetical to t! he only major political party that does in fact care about poor people (if only erratically).

MacInnes recognizes that the GOP, the "party of Lincoln," has been on the wrong side of the race issue since, well, Lincoln. So it's up to Democrats to make a principled stand and balance justice and realistic expectations. This book, though discussion-provoking, is not a great place to begin.