Taxpayers and Homeowners, Forgotten Men, and Citizen-Workers: Theorizing Conservative Egalitarianism.

political theory;discourse;race;populism;American politics;Political Science;Social Sciences;Political Science

Baribeau, ErinMickey, Robert W. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: political theory;    discourse;    race;    populism;    American politics;    Political Science;    Social Sciences;    Political Science;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/110314/ebari_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation makes a discursive analysis of what Thomas Edsall terms ;;conservative egalitarianism,;; a fusion of equality, bootstrap individualism, fiscal restraint, and racial conservatism that Edsall understands as the ideological underpinning for the rise of the New Right, which he (and others) have explained as ;;white backlash;; against the social programs of the 1960s. I propose to understand conservative egalitarianism not as an ideology but as a discursive complex composed of commonsense notions, cultural texts, public policies, Supreme Court decisions, and other linguistic resources that created the conditions of possibility for fusing equality to fiscal and racial conservatism. By locating the development of conservative egalitarianism in citizen conversations, correspondence with political and judicial elites, in the news media, within political organizations and social movements, and in popular culture, this dissertation contributes to political and democratic theory by providing an account of the ways in which citizens become political-ideological subjects, and of the ways in which bodies are marked by discourses of race. Although this dissertation aims more broadly to provide a discursive analysis of conservative egalitarianism, it also extends and deepens popular accounts of the rise of backlash in three key ways. First, it emphasizes that the appeal of conservative egalitarianism was contingent; it did not follow necessarily from changing directions in the economy or public policy.Second, by its discursive analysis of subject formation, the dissertation shifts attention from a focus on elite partisan strategies and political projects to the appeal that raced populist identities and discourses held for a diverse group of citizens. These identities and discourses include the white taxpayer and homeowner, as well as what I call the ;;(Forgotten) Man in the Street.;; As I argue, these citizens are not only hailed by conservative egalitarianism: they are also co-architects in its construction. Third, I situate conservative egalitarianism alongside its challengers, specifically black civil rights and labor activists, who shaped alternative discourses of equality that could be used to challenge conservative egalitarian claims to equality and civil rights.