Getting a fix on fragmentation: "Breakdown" as estimation error, rhetorical strategy, and organizational accomplishment

The Fractious Nation?: Unity and Division in Contemporary American Life

Volumn , Issue , 2003, Pages 13-54

  Rieder, Jonathan ^a,b  

^a USA   (United States)

^b Howard Hughes Medical Institute   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 79958481201     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (82)

1. The language of embeddedness and emergence comes from Ernest Schachtel's brilliant Metamorphosis: On the Development of Affect, Perception, Attention, and Memory (New York: Basic Books, 1959).
2. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1960; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).
3. Kevin P. Phillips, Post-Conservative America: People, Politics, and Ideology in a Time of Crisis (New York: Random House, 1982), 157.
4. Jonathan Rieder, "Reflections on Crown Heights: Interpretive Dilemmas and Black-Jewish Relations," in Antisemitism in America Today, ed. Jerome A. Chanes (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1995), 348-84.
5. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "The Uses of Anti-Semitism," in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, ed. Paul Berman (New York: Delacorte Press, 1994), 217, 218.
6. Highlights from the November 1998 Anti-Defamation League Survey on Anti-Semitism and Prejudice in America (New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1998), 24.
7. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Jews and the New American Scene (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 104-5.
8. Inge-Lise Ameer, "The Daily Dance," CommonQuest, vol. 3, no. 4/vol. 4. no. 1: 36-39.
9. Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), 363.
10. Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 512.
11. Alan Wolfe, One Nation After All (New York: Viking, 1998), 283, 278.
12. Michael W. Miles, The Odyssey of the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
13. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), esp. chap. 3, "The Recovery of Values and Tradition";
14. Jonathan Rieder, "The Rise of the 'Silent Majority,'" in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 243-68.
15. James Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1973), 312.
16. Jeffery M. Paige, "Political Orientation and Riot Participation," American Sociological Review 36 (Oct. 1971): 810-20.
17. Stanley Greenberg, Middle Class Dreams: The Politics and Power of the New American Majority, rev. ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 5.
18. William Schneider, "What the Democrats Must Do," New Republic, March 11, 1985, 17.
19. James Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 338.
20. No inherent logic of functionalist unity perfectly aligns the dynamics within each sphere. The degree of alignment or friction is historically variable. Thus during the civil rights movement, racial tension created opportunities for racist demagogues, who intensified conflict within the polity. On the other hand, the centrist dynamic of a two-party electoral system may modulate ethnic and racial fragmentation. Still, as we scrutinize examples from each of the three realms, we will encounter notable formal parallels.
21. Molly Ivins, Nothin' but Good Times Ahead (New York: Random House, 1993), 236.
22. The poem appears at the start of Peter Viereck's famous 1955 essay, "The Revolt against the Elite," reprinted in The Radical Right, ed. Daniel Bell (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), 161.
23. Fund-raising letter from national Moral Majority headquarters, August 14, 1980.
24. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right- Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1977, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 118.
25. For an early statement that dissects various paradigms of new right cultural mobilization
26. Jonathan Rieder, "What Is the New Right?" in What Is Pro-Family Policy? Proceedings of the Bush Center Symposium on Family Policy, ed. Susan Munchow and Mary McFarland (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy, 1982);
27. Jonathan Rieder, "Crazes, Crusades, and Cockfights," lecture delivered at Emory University, March 1983.
28. For an evocative portrait of the internal diversity in evangelical life
29. Randy Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
30. Public Opinion 4 (April/May 1981): 24-25. Although the summary reported that on "a limited set of social questions which touch directly upon family and home life and upon personal morality," evangelical Christians are more conservative than nonevangelical Americans, "in part, this difference reflects the regional and class makeup of the evangelical movement. Southerners and those of lower social and economic status (SES) are more conservative culturally, and are more inclined toward evangelical persuasions" (24).
31. Ralph Reed, Politically Incorrect: The Emerging Faith Factor in American Politics (Dallas, Tex.: Word Publishing, 1994), 225.
32. Tom W. Smith, A Survey of the Religious Right: Views on Politics, Society, Jews, and Other Minorities (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1996).
33. James Davison Hunter, "The Evangelical Worldview since 1890," in Piety and Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World, ed. Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1987), 52.
34. Smith, Survey of the Religious Right, 31.
35. Key leaders of the secular new right were quite open in the opportunism of their stoking of culture war issues. As A. James Reichley recounts, " 'The New Right is looking for issues that people care about,' observed Paul Weyrich, director of the right-wing Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. 'Social issues, at least for the present, fill the bill.'" Because neither Weyrich nor two other key players, Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips, were Protestants, they began to cultivate friendships with important fundamentalists and evangelicals who might build a network of Republican Christian activists.
36. A.James Reichley, Religion in American Public Life (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), 319-20.
37. Jerry Falwell, Strength for the Journey (New York: Pocket Books, 1987), 276.
38. Reed, Politically Incorrect, 237, 65. This Christian version of identity politics offered one final parallel with the larger society from which religious traditionalists were said to be alienated. Far from an earthy resignation to human fallibility, the Protestant cultural critique brimmed with the classical Armenian strain in America's dissenting religious tradition that rejected the dour pessimism of Calvinist predestination. Just as Freud's existential pessimism was transmuted into a sunny technology of mind-cure in the United States, the bornagain ethos reflected not world-weary flight from the world but a faith in the possibilities of individual renewal and upward spiritual mobility. So the religious version of perfectionism-with its resolve to eliminate sin-did not really look so out of key with its more secular forms-hygienic, sexual, and therapeutic, with their search for perfect everythings from abdomens to psyches. Increasingly suffused with therapeutic ideology, Christian protest converged with other forms of recovery and authenticity.
39. The best estimates suggest that after Wallace Dean Muhammad broke with the Nation of Islam and its apocalyptic brand of Muslim racialism, Farrakhan retained only ten to twenty thousand followers in the Nation of Islam, whereas one hundred thousand adherents followed Muhammad toward a more conventional, nonracist Sunni Islam.
40. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), 390.
41. For Wallace Muhammad's invitation to white people to join the Nation of Islam
42. Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (New York: Pantheon, 1999), esp. chap. 19 and epilogue.
43. Jonathan Rieder, "Trouble in Store: Behind the Brooklyn Boycott," New Republic, July 2, 1990, 16-22.
44. Joel D. Aberbach and Jack L. Walker, "The Meanings of Black Power: A Comparison of White and Black Interpretations of a Political Slogan," American Political Science Review 64 (June 1970): 367-88.
45. One should not press the point too far. In a notable countervailing tendency the empathetic impulse can be glimpsed in a spate of studies of those supposedly decertified others-fundamentalist Christians, evangelicals, and Orthodox and Hasidic Jews-carried out by the very liberal, feminist, and even leftist social scientists who are supposed to be so eager to certify only their own kind. Lyn Davidman's Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991);
46. Debra R. Kaufman's Rachel's Daughters: Newly Orthodox Jewish Women (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991);
47. Faye Ginsburg's Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989);
48. Judith Stacey's Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late-Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Basic Books, 1990) all seek to understand the rich nuances and spiritual integrity of "alien" cultures without the presuppositions that have often deformed liberal cosmopolitan takes on exotic "others."
49. John Cuddihy, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (New York: Seabury Press, 1978).
50. Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992);
51. Milton Vickerman, Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chaps. 3-5.
52. R. Stephen Warner, "Changes in the Civic Role of Religion," in Diversity and Its Discontents, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Jeffrey C. Alexander (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
53. Lawrence W. Levine, The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), xiv.
54. Michael Walzer, "Comment [on Charles Taylor]," in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 99-103.
55. Peter Steinfels, "Renewing the Forest: Catholics in the Multicultural Mix," CommonQuest, vol. 3, no. 3/vol. 4, no. 1: 92.
56. Hee-Jung Hwang, Fresh Market: Mexicans, Koreans, and the Making of a New Pluralism (unpublished undergraduate senior thesis, Department of Sociology, Barnard College, 2001). In this pattern of mutual recognition one can find a parallel in the realm of gender and sexuality. In the lamentations of the cultural right, American life has been fractured by moral relativism, antifamily feminism, and sexual promiscuity. At the same time, the ideals of comparable worth and a right to sexual gratification can be seen not as the legitimation of narcissistic pleasure but as an ethic of mutuality against a "fragmenting" masculinity that thinks only of its interests and pleasure.
57. Scott McConnell, "O. J. Fallout: Are We 'Two Nations'?" New York Post, Oct. 11, 1995, 19.
58. Quoted in Henry Louis Gates Jr., Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (New York: Random House, 1997), 119.
59. Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, The Scar of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 34.
60. For a more detailed exploration of these issues, especially of the diverse motives governing white backlash,
61. Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
62. Cited in Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 90.
63. Sniderman and Piazza, Scar of Race, 44-45.
64. "Reasonable doubt has a history attached to it and a color," writes Marcia Ann Gillespie in "Reasonable Doubt," in The Darden Dilemma: Twelve Black Writers on Justice, Race, and Conflicting Loyalties, ed. Ellis Cose (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 107.
65. Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 111.
66. David A. Hollinger, quoted in Nancy Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration (New Haven, Conn., and New York: Yale University Press and Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), 185.
67. Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America, 2d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
68. Philip Kasinitz, "Children of America: The Second Generation Comes of Age," CommonQuest vol. 4, no. 3: 35.
69. Roberto Suro, Strangers among Us: How Latino Immigrants Are Transforming America (New York: Knopf, 1998), 116.
70. Jonathan Rieder, "Crown of Thorns: The Roots of the Black-Jewish Feud," New Republic, Oct. 14, 1991, 26-31;
71. Peter Noel, "Crown Heights Burning," Village Voice, Sep. 3, 1991, 37-40. 59.
72. Mary C. Waters gives a good account of this splitting in Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), esp. chaps. 6 and 8.
73. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).
74. Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 28.
75. Reagan's remarks to the National Association of Evangelicals' Annual Convention, Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983, reprinted in Paul D. Erickson, Reagan Speaks: The Making of an American Myth (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 155-66. After telling the audience of his belief in "intercessionary prayer" and condemning abortion and sexual promiscuity, Reagan added, "There is sin and evil in the world, and we're enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might" (161).
76. New York Times, Jan. 22, 1982, A20.
77. Conservative Digest, July 1982.
78. New York Times, Sep. 25, 1982, 9.
79. Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Boston: MIT Press, 1967), 47.
80. Kathleen Jamieson's discussion of this point in her Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), chap. 6.
81. Kenneth Wald, Religion and Politics in the United States (New York: St. Martin's, 1987).
82. Dr. Tim LaHaye, "The Clintonistas' War against God," Family Life Seminars' Capital Report 8 (Oct. 1994): 1.