Roundtable on Averbeck’s *Liberalism Is Not Enough* – Entry #3 by Tim Lacy

As a committed socialist and a historian, my sympathies with the contents of Robin Marie Averbeck’s Liberalism Is Not Enough cannot be overstated. I could not help but cheer large chunks of her narrative, which highlights the racism inherent in postwar elites’ analysis of poverty. I share Averbeck’s passion for social justice, both presently and, when possible, in choices for historical exploration.

Published late in 2018, Liberalism Is Not Enough anticipated many important discussions that would arise, in politics and in our institutions, in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder. Averbeck’s book was prescient in explaining how true equity and equality, especially in terms of economic justice, have been studiously avoided in our political sphere since the 1970s. It speaks positively of her absorption of the antiracist principles in Ibram X. Kendi’s work (which was not published in book form until after Averbeck’s). Averbeck assumes that many historical actors, black or white, operate with some level of racism inherent in their work and actions. None of us are free from its taint.

Averbeck’s book covers characters familiar to most who have reviewed midcentury politics and its associated intellectual histories. Names such as Daniel Bell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Michael Harrington, Richard Hofstadter, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, C. Wright Mills, David Riesman, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and James Q. Wilson have long been familiar to historians of this period—so ably introduced by Richard Pells in his 1985 classic, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age and read against George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (1976 & 1996). Given my own work on the history of education, especially in higher education, I had been familiar with the cultural criticisms of neoconservatives. Names such as Nathan Glazer, Kristol, Lipset, and Riesman have moved in and out of my explorations of free speech on campuses, critiques of curriculum (especially regarding expansions for inclusionary purposes), and the presence of the counterculture in student life. But I was unaware, before reading Liberalism Is Not Enough, of the depth of their involvement on the public discourse about the culture of poverty. The writings and work of Daniel Patrick Moynihan were a particular lacuna in my historical research. He is a central character in Averbeck’s narrative.

The problems of race and racism challenged all midcentury liberals and conservatives. The Civil Rights Movement forced a reckoning not just with equality in education, politics, culture, and society, but also eventually in economics. Racial capitalism was the elephant in the room. Averbeck ably shows how liberal intellectuals who should have known better dodged any substantial economic redistribution for Black Americans. When they could not dodge it, they punched back using the tools of social scientists and arguments around culture. They even used the ideas of democracy, ironically, to argue against active integration and redistribution. In an era that could not admit the weaknesses of capitalism and faults in institutions of liberalism, given Cold War international politics and the escalating war in Vietnam, they avoided criticizing capitalism at all costs. They instead discussed access, opportunity, and individual freedoms.

Averbeck brings the receipts, especially in relation to over-esteemed work of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. She is particularly adept at showing the contradictions and lack of empirical evidence in the sociology of poverty. Liberalism Is Not Enough serves as a grand tour through the faulty thought and practical bandaids of postwar social science—and how they infected government activities, especially in President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. They were shot through with white supremacist and sexist assumptions about work ethic and just rewards (always centered on the “cultural practices of whites”). The “culture of affluence” always seemed to reflect “the worthiness of white groups” (p. 90). Averbeck channels the work of Cheryl I. Harris to note this racist inclination in Glazer and Moynihan’s 1970 book, Beyond the Melting Pot.

Thinking about Moynihan’s important and outsized role in the public discourse about the culture of poverty brings me to a few criticisms of Liberalism Is Not Enough.

This book is too short. I appreciate easily digestible academic reading, but several related topics in Averbeck’s study deserve more attention. First, given the consequences of his work, more background is needed on Moynihan. We need to know more about his upbringing, education, intellectual influences, and political ideals to understand his strange political career. We are teased, biographically, with a snippet about “being abandoned by his father and living in less than respectable neighborhoods” (p. 87). We are also reminded, in the conclusion, about Senator Moynihan voting against President Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform bill–the ideologically-inflected “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act” (p. 98-99)—which embodied long-held culture-of-poverty assumptions.

With Moynihan more attention also needed to be given to the backgrounds of Glazer, Lipset, Riesman, and Myrdal. We need to understand more deeply how their racial commitments bore on the culture-of-poverty dialogue. More about these figures would have enriched the feel around this particular community of discourse that turned, in several cases, from liberalism to neoconservatism. Additional context would have added weight to Averbeck’s justified and laudable focus on consequences over intentions (p. 49).

Liberalism Is Not Enough dances around the topic of meritocracy. Again, we get snippets of related concerns. The topic of “competence” is raised in relation to black political participation and normative political behaviors (pp. 45-48). The notion of “normal channels of upward mobility” is integrated in Averbeck’s discussion about competence (p. 47). The inability to “compete” surfaces in the context of a conversation about social pathologies related to the history of slavery (p. 60). A lack of patience was noted, by Moynihan and Glazer, in relation to Black Americans’ climb through “the processes of bureaucratic advancement.” Moynihan and Glazer not how Black Americans were unaware of “how long a time was necessary at one level to reach the next” (p. 89). The idea that merit and work bring just rewards is firmly ensconced in the black and white middle and working classes. To challenge racial capitalism and poverty in the United States, faulty notions of merit must be deconstructed.

Finally, the slipperiness of the idea of ‘liberalism’ is noted by Averbeck but nevertheless used. The “pluralist” community of thinkers, outlined in chapter one and especially well covered in Pells’ book, is hard to grasp for those new to mid-twentieth-century intellectual-political history. But that phrasing has the virtue of avoiding the host of assumptions held by today’s readers about the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism.’ The abuse of those two words by conservatives over the past 40 years means that negative assumptions about socialism and communitarian politics are submerged in readers’ minds. The author’s commitment to disparage the racism of past liberal actors makes present-day, necessary alliances with liberals more fraught.

Black Americans who are committed to the Democratic Party and liberalism will find the tone of Liberalism Is Not Enough difficult, if not an outright turn-off. To fight current fascists and authoritarians, socialists need firm alliances with many self-proclaimed liberals and adherents to liberalism. What good does it do, for instance, to call out and argue with Michael Kazin, the historian and long-time co-editor of the left-wing magazine Dissent, as well as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, as a mere accommodator of old racial liberalism? That call-out plays into the long-tradition of leftists eating their own. It does little, practically, to help preserve democracy or forward the cause of socialism in the United States.

Despite my complaints and critiques, my overall feeling for Liberalism Is Not Enough remains positive. I share Averbeck’s admiration for several thinkers and philosopher-activists cited in the text: Frances Fox Piven, Richard Cloward, Cedric Robinson, Jefferson Cowie, and Ibram X. Kendi. I have yet to fully absorb the lessons of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, but one of his great books, Silencing the Past, sits on my shelf—ready for a deeper reading. I also appreciate her admonition about intellectual historians sometimes focusing too much on intent and systems of thought, and thereby inadequately exploring the consequences of the thinking of historical actors on everyday people (p. 49). Our specialty needs that nudge. In sum, I want to congratulate Averbeck for a giving us a work that concisely summarizes and analyzes liberal discourse around the culture of poverty idea—one of the major failings of midcentury liberalism.