Roundtable on Averbeck’s *Liberalism Is Not Enough* – Entry #2 by Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

In Liberalism is Not Enough, Robin Marie Averbeck offers an intellectual history of postwar liberalism to argue that Great Society achievements, including hallmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, were firmly rooted in capitalism and the white supremacy of their policy architects. Her thesis challenges the popular conceptualization of the American political story of the last half-century: that liberals of the 1960s were dedicated to designing a fairer social landscape until they were interrupted by conservatives who extinguished the spirit of reform through widespread neoliberalism. Instead, Averbeck explains, postwar liberalism is “fundamentally reactionary” and has “fertilized the soil from which the conservative movement emerged” (pp. 5-6). Further, her research demonstrates that the liberal state as it existed “laid the groundwork and actively started construction on the political projects that would go on to devastate and destroy the lives of countless black, brown, and poor people” (p. 9).

Underlying these claims is the culture of poverty framework that was conceived by pluralists, a term Averbeck uses synonymously with liberals who include Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, and other contemporary political scientists and commentators. As Averbeck points out, their scholarly and policy contributions rested on scant empirical research but, “ensconced in universities and protected by white male privilege, they spoke for a white and liberal audience, and received a resounding applause that echoes to this day” (p. 33) through decades of well-intended but harmful policy programs.

The culture of poverty framework had critical implications for liberals whose primary interests were in bolstering the American economy. In the Cold War years, academics and policy experts conceived of liberalism “as the only antidote to terrifying, totalitarian alternatives” (p. 19) that might appeal to the working class; thus, the poor themselves posed a threat to American democracy (p. 22). The far ends of the political spectrum were deemed irrational, even pathological, according to liberals who blamed radicalism on the poor’s “psychological maladjustments to modernity” (p. 25). In this way, liberals diagnosed poverty as “a problem of individual mental health” (p. 40) rather than an outcome of economic and structural inequality. Protests, sit-ins, and other forms of activism were dangerous to the stability of the vital center. Only the traditional avenues of political assertion, such as voting, were seen as legitimate means to rectify the problems of the poor; though traditional politics sustained this unequal system.

In the same way, the culture of poverty framework also helped white liberals explain blatant racial inequities they needed to deflect in the dual contexts of the Cold War and civil rights movement. As the US condemned totalitarianism abroad, domestic social unrest forced white intellectuals to incorporate race in their technocratic calculations. They explained away antiblack racism as “an oddity of the South” (p. 23) while failing to recognize racism as a longstanding feature of the American project. Just as the culture of poverty thesis diagnosed economic deprivation as an individual shortcoming, liberals asserted that nonwhites blamed society for their personal problems, such as single motherhood, rather than accepting responsibility for (in the white liberal estimation) their own shortcomings.

Averbeck asserts that by omitting structural racism as a factor for political and economic inequality, pluralists turned to culture to explain away stark contrasts in outcomes for poor people of color and the white and nonwhite middle class. She highlights the hypocrisy of pluralists who refused “to zoom out—where the intolerance and abuses of power so central to American history would be harder to miss” (p. 31) to avoid grappling with internal crises while condemning communist regimes abroad. Through what Averbeck terms a “discourse of dodges,” (p. 42) in which pluralists refused to acknowledge the interrelatedness of race and poverty, institutional racism could be simultaneously perpetuated and denied.

Liberalism is Not Enough is a short and provocative intellectual history. It is organized into four chapters. Chapter 1 provides the scholarly foundation of postwar liberal political thought with a focus on the concept of the vital center that characterized deviations from liberal moderation as dangerously radical. Chapter 2 explores how federal antipoverty programs were rooted in the belief that the nonwhite poor were incapable of effectively organizing to help themselves; thus, white liberals attempted to “educate” the black and brown poor without effectively addressing their poverty. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the culture of poverty concept and the ways it has been made useful for conservative reactionaries who have wielded it to champion the mass incarceration of black and brown poor through the War on Crime and the War on Drugs. Averbeck dedicates nearly the entire conclusion to addressing potential counterarguments, insisting convincingly that above all, “race delineates who the freedoms of liberalism liberate” (p. 101) and the “consistency of liberalism’s inextricable relationship with white supremacy” (p. 102).

Averbeck spends a considerable amount of time in discussion of counterarguments that defend pluralists’ good intentions. She describes her own approach as one “that prioritizes results” (p. 7). With incredible framing, the author asserts: “If liberals got the causes, content, and consequences of poverty so wrong, we must turn away from simply repeating their own perspectives and then ask what work [emphasis original] such ideas did for the liberal elites that produced and popularized them” (p. 50). The outcome, of course, is a bolstering of structural racism and economic inequality.

Averbeck has crafted a scathing analysis of the pluralist legacy (especially that of Moynihan) without the project reading as a polemic. Rather, Liberalism is Not Enough fortifies existing literature on neoliberalism, racial and economic justice, and the modern carceral state. She calls upon the works of historians Rickie Solinger, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Daniel Geary, Naomi Murakawa, Mical Raz, Malcolm McLaughlin, Ira Katznelson, Jefferson Cowie, Karen Ferguson, and scholar-activists Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi.

Averbeck does not mince words in explaining her purpose for writing: “To all who identify with an antiracist and anticapitalist tradition, I hope to offer more knowledge and ammunition to make the case that we must begin building something fundamentally new. As for liberals who lean to the Left, I hope to nudge them to consider that despite some obvious virtues, liberalism is not an ideology or a political practice that can carry us to the type of society we likely both envision” (p. 9). Averbeck maintains, “For those devoted to social justice and equality, liberalism is simply not enough.” (p. 103).