New Orleans: The Missing Progressive Alternative

Implicit throughout the volume—and explicit in a few of the essays, particularly those by Johnson as well as John Arena—is the notion that recovery and redevelopment in New Orleans could have proceeded in a very different manner than it actually has. At no point, however, does the volume lay out in depth just what such a democratic alternative might have looked like.

Presumably, however, it would have involved an active and energetic public sector–led response combining a massive, New Deal–scaled influx of resources, close attention to the distributive consequences of recovery policies, and ample scope for democratic participation. The authors suggest that the idea of a “right to return” might have been used as a guiding moral framework for policy development. Arena cites the Civil Works Administration of the 1930s as an example of using “direct government employment” to get things done.

Thus, instead of relying on thousands of college students and others to provide volunteer labor to perform initial clean-up work such as gutting houses, the federal government might have hired thousands of workers at solid, livable wages, thereby both getting the work done faster (and saving many homes from avoidable ruin resulting from months of neglect after the storm) and jump-starting the economy. Government might have provided generous buyout terms to homeowners in the Lower 9th Ward and elsewhere not inclined to resettle or rebuild, rather than allowing speculators to gain control of some properties at cut-rate prices while others stood neglected, a standing obstacle to efforts to rebuild coherent neighborhoods. Renters might have been treated on equal terms with homeowners in disbursing relief funds.

Above all, policy need not have proceeded from the assumption that the storm presented an opportunity to literally flush out concentrations of poverty and embark on neoliberal experimentation. Two interlocking issues are in play here: first, the question of how to understand the causes of concentrated poverty, and second, the question of how to best respond to it.

Conservative mythology presented concentrated poverty as a product of welfare dependence, lack of individual initiative, and excessive government, with no scrutiny of the structural economic conditions in the New Orleans labor market or of the specific local history, which concentrated low-income African Americans into particular places in New Orleans. More liberal views, such as those expressed in a controversial post-Katrina petition circulated by Xavier Briggs and William Julius Wilson, appealed not to such blatant prejudices but to social science evidence that pointed to the deleterious impact of living in high-poverty neighborhoods on low-income individuals' likelihood of escaping poverty. Both views suggested that there is little inherent value in attempting to restore the integrity of low-income neighborhoods in New Orleans, and lent sanction to efforts aimed at dispersing low-income and public-housing residents.

Such views gain plausibility, even from a progressive humanitarian perspective, if one does not believe that there is a legitimate possibility of undertaking a serious place-based, people-enhancing approach to the remediation of poverty. In a 2002 book (Making a Place for Community: Local Democracy in a Global Era), David Imbroscio, Gar Alperovitz, and I articulated a place-based policy approach organized around the concept of full employment in the community. Our book predated Katrina, but had in mind many other examples of “throw-away” cities resulting from deindustrialization and capital flight, sometimes—as in Cleveland, Detroit, and St. Louis—on a massive scale. We called on local governments to deploy multiple strategies, from local import substitution to encouragement of worker-owned firms to direct municipal ownership, in order to stabilize capital and jobs in place over the long term, and further called for state, regional, and federal policies that in effect guarantee to cities what I have termed in recent work a “right to capital.” (Imbroscio has further developed the argument in direct debate with Briggs and related scholars in a series of journal articles, as well as in his 2010 book Urban America Reconsidered: Alternatives for Governance and Policy.)

Johnson gives clear indication at various points that he would be sympathetic to this agenda, such as the call for including worker cooperatives as part of the reconstruction process. But in my view, the volume does not make sufficiently clear that what needs to be challenged is not just neoliberal ideology but the lopsided distribution of capital defended by the ideology. It is the systemic lack of adequate employment and locally based capital in American cities that leads politicians of both parties to adopt business-friendly policies and to make many (sincere) boosters of cities believe that their favored place's best hope lies in recruiting new investment from mobile private capital. Seen in this light, “neoliberalism” is not really the most important target but, rather, the way urban political economies are structured in the United States, with places perpetually in competition with one another for scarce capital.

If one accepts this diagnosis, then it becomes clear that effective social criticism and the forging of an effective new politics cannot depend only on the critique of dominant ideologies, but must also engage in the constructive work of articulating and fleshing out a systemic alternative. In the absence of such an alternative vision, persons of goodwill and many progressives concerned to do something to help almost inevitably will (at best) end up retracing Brad Pitt's footsteps: sponsoring in or participating in projects that may do some concrete good, without seriously challenging the prevailing redevelopment paradigm.

The Critical Role of the Middle Class

Here is where things get difficult. If the aim is to constructively provide an account of how the United States and its urban areas could and should be organized differently, we must recognize and take seriously the facts that a) most Americans are not self-described progressive activists with strong egalitarian commitments, and b) in no major American city is it now possible to have a majority coalition of working-class and low-income voters that can implement an unabashedly progressive agenda. The upshot of these observations, in my view, is that a) a stable progressive governing coalition, in both particular cities and in the United States more generally, requires the support of significant segments of the middle class, and b) an important obstacle to the formation of such a coalition is the skewed, biased view of poor people held by many middle-class people and the consequent unwillingness of much of the middle class to identify with the needs and interests of the poor.

At several points in The Neoliberal Deluge, contributors reference this latter problem (i.e., the willingness of middle-class whites to believe that the fundamental problem of low-income African Americans is some character or cultural flaw), but little is offered by way of a constructive response. Moreover, the volume almost goes out of its way to avoid acknowledging certain realities that tend to reinforce those biases—such as the reality of an extraordinarily high rate of violent crime in post-Katrina New Orleans (murder rates in the city were 12 times the national average in 2011), a dreadful injustice that is not discussed at all.

That omission represents a missed opportunity, one with political significance. I suspect that the contributors may have worried that acknowledging the high rates of crime in contemporary New Orleans might have reinforced white stereotypes about unruly youth of color. But as usual, while the violent crime rate continues to hamper the city's recovery in a variety of ways, its primary victims are the poor and marginalized.

Rather than avoid the issue, the authors could and perhaps should have presented the problem as Exhibit A in the failure of the neoliberal recovery model in New Orleans. It is predictable that in the absence of a serious effort to create jobs and bring tangible economic opportunities to all residents, the shock of displacement, combined with the lack of adequate employment, combined with thousands and thousands of damaged and abandoned buildings, would create a breeding ground for crime, which in turn is a direct threat to any notion of a “right to return” worth defending.

This is an important point in itself, but one with broader significance for those concerned with crafting a serious alternative to neoliberalism: Just because the middle class cares about an issue does not mean that it is unimportant. The continued violent crime in New Orleans, if not understood as a symptom of failure of the recovery, will instead inevitably be interpreted as further evidence of the inherent dysfunction of low-income communities of color and justification for aggressive (if not paramilitary) policing strategies.

Likewise, the volume's critique of neoliberalism targets many nonprofit and philanthropic efforts as inherently inadequate, with the further suggestion that every good deed done by such groups in New Orleans has also created its own punishment: further legitimation of neoliberal ideology (“Look, we don't need government to do it”). A more productive rhetorical and political stance, however, would have been to ask what it would have taken to shift the Brad Pitts and similar characters from individual “do-gooders” to highly politicized, prominent public advocates for a genuinely community-oriented reconstruction approach. It also would take seriously the positive aspects of at least some of the interventions by outside groups, such as a Cornell University planning team that, within the first year of Katrina, initiated a participatory planning process in the Lower 9th Ward that was a genuine attempt to model inclusive planning.

Such a positive rapprochement with the do-gooders would, in my view, have three requirements: clear articulation of an alternative redevelopment strategy guided by democratic rather than market logic; a place made within that strategy for contributions from nonprofit groups and organizations of local residents, especially those that engage in community participatory planning; and acknowledgment of the goodwill and positive practices of those local organizations that already exist. In short, the alternative to neoliberalism cannot simply be a statist model of redevelopment. It also has to make space and give leeway to nonstate actors—particularly when those actors may more accurately reflect the views and needs of residents than the actual state.

Stephen Elkin, himself a prominent critic of corporate business bias in urban political regimes, has compellingly argued that in any plausible account of a significantly reformed political regime in the United States, the middle class inevitably must play a pivotal role. If they are not part of the governing coalition, there will not be a progressive governing coalition. That analysis is a difficult pill to swallow for radical analysts, who have pointed out how susceptible the biases of many middle-class people against the poor and the nonwhite are to manipulation by leaders who craft narratives designed to appeal to these biases and who promote a fundamentally nonsociological analysis of society that interprets social problems in terms of individual character failures.

Both Elkin and the radical critics of the middle class are right. The conclusion that follows is by no means novel, and by no means unique in American history, but still worth stating explicitly: Crafting a strategy that can move beyond that impasse and persuade the middle class to side with the working class and the poor and not with the entrepreneurs of neoliberalism is an absolutely central prerequisite for forging a serious progressive politics in the twenty-first century.