The new Victorians.

As Professor Kathryn Oberdeck of the University of Illinois likes to say, the Twentieth Century has not been so appealing that we should have to live through it all over again. Her insight seems truer all the time.

In the last week and a half I read three tracts that uncannily echo Victorian-era racial ideology--all by people with reputable mainstream affiliations. With a word change here and there to avoid unfashionably direct references to racial determinism, today's rhetoric about race, culture, and "Western Civilization's" conflicts and responsibilities in the Third World builds on insidious Nineteenth-Century theories.

Samuel Huntington, distinguished professor and director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard (as well as Vietnam war strategist, CIA consort, and house intellectual for the Rockefellers' Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission), in an article from last summer's Foreign Affairs, announced:

"The world will be shaped in large measure by the interaction among seven or eight major civilizations...Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, SlavicOrthodox, Latin American, and possibly []] African. The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the fault lines separating these civilizations from one another [because] differences among civilizations are not only real, they are basic.... The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views on the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear. They are more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes.... The paramount axis of world politics will be the relations between `the West and the Rest.'"

Compare this with the peroration by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (also at one time a Harvard professor) in behalf of restricting immigration in 1896. After asserting the affinity of the "English-speaking, Germans, Scandinavians, and French" and the confluence of those and "allied races" as the basic population in North America, Lodge counterpoised them to the rest of the world, which he divided among Southern and Eastern Europeans, "Mongol," "Negro," and "Hindoo."

"The men of each race possess an indestructible stock of ideas, traditions, sentiments, modes of thought, an unconscious inheritance from their ancestors, upon which argument has no effect. What makes a race are their mental and, above all, their moral characteristics, the slow growth and accumulation of toil and conflict," Lodge wrote. "These are the qualities which determine their social efficiency as a people, which make one race rise and another fall."

On the subject of rising and falling, I then happened upon Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy, published in 1993 by Joel Kotkin, when he was a senior fellow at the Center for the New West and an international fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Business and Management. As an example of Kotkin's atavism (to use a suitably Victorian term), he rhapsodizes about the British and American imperial era:

"But the British tribe's greatest legacy extends far beyond its physical assets and investments.... In a host of critical fields--from accounting and advertising to culture, science, and, finally, the operations of government--the Anglo-Saxons created standards not just for their own race, or for their colonies, but also for the entire modern world."

At the other end of the Anglo-American imperialist enterprise, in 1900, Progressive Republican Senator Albert Beveridge justified the urge to colonize the Philippines in the following way:

"It is essential. it is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for a force such as this, the world would relapse into barbarism and night."

Finally, not long ago I came upon a draft chapter from a forthcoming book by Charles Murray, a Harvard-trained political scientist and habitue of respectably right-wing think tanks, best known for his perverse argument for "tough love" welfare reform. Murray's co-author is Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein, who has made his reputation since the early 1970s trying to prove blacks' innate mental inferiority. Their objective is to determine whether contemporary Federal affirmative-action policies are "scientifically" defensible. They purport to find, unsurprisingly, significant "ethnic" differences in intelligence that are not especially responsive to remedial action. Except for the modern research terminology, this text could have been written a century ago.

No aspect of Nineteenth-Century racist discourse is too outrageous to reappear. Consider a few recent examples:

Mary Ann Mele, a Reagan Administration official, complained that blacks have not yet overcome the effects of "ten thousand years of jungle freedom."

Frederick Goodwin, head of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration under President Bush, proposed a direct link between allegedly "hyperaggressive, hypersexual" inner-city minority males' behavior and that of "monkeys...in the wild," suggesting that it is no accident that inner-city neighborhoods are sometimes referred to as "jungles." (Goodwin has since been promoted to head the National Institute of Mental Health.)

John McArdle, a University of Virginia psychologist, and at least two other members of the research team that sets standards for eligibility for athletic participation and scholarships for the National Collegiate Athletic Association, are centrally involved in the explicitly eugenicist Beyondism Foundation.

Senator Ernest F. Hollings recycled a powerful trope, especially in Southern politics, remarking at the conclusion of the recent meetings on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade on "potentates from down in Africa [who] rather than eating each other, they'd just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva."

In the Fall 1992 issue of The American Prospect, Yale political scientist Rogers M. Smith examines similarities and differences between our current period and the aftermath of Reconstruction. He shows how, both then and now, limited but significant victories for democratic interests were followed by surges of racist, nativist, sexist, and antilabor rhetoric and action. In each case, the backlash was aided by liberal turncoats who, then as now, either embraced the new reactionary agendas with born-again enthusiasm, or rationalized their capitulation as the only practical route.

Smith points out that the defeat of egalitarian interests didn't succeed in reinstating slavery. Rather, new forms of oppression, such as Jim Crow and the sharecrop system, took slavery's place in enforcing racial subordination. So today, he argues, we should not expect to hear calls for a literal return to Jim Crow, but rather some new and superficially different form of institutionalized racial inequality.

That is not to say that there is a cyclical pattern at work. Smith and others demonstrate that the racist reaction to egalitarian aspirations hasn't disappeared and recurred: it never left.

Whites argued against forming the Freedmen's Bureau to assist former slaves, and opposed the 1875 Civil Rights Act in the same rhetoric, and often in the same language of "coddling" and "encouraging dependency" that Charles Murray uses when he calls for eliminating AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, and affirmative action.

Liberals rationalized black disenfranchisement after the Compromise of 1876 that ended Reconstruction in the same language of concern for affronted white sensibilities that we hear from minions of the Democratic Leadership Council today.

Likewise, the pseudo-objective formulations to which respectable racists resort have never gone completely out of fashion. The allegedly disinterested, "scientific" argument for racial hierarchy is a motif at least as old as the United States. Thomas Jefferson hid behind it, even feigning sympathy for inevitably benighted blacks. Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man dissects an unbroken trajectory--from Francis Galton, the mid-Nineteenth-Century founder of eugenics, to Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen in the 1970s--of scientists' attempts to explain social inequality through the metaphors of presumably immutable biological forces.

As late as 1962, Carleton S. Coon, a well-known University of Pennsylvania anthropologist, published The Origin of Races, in which he argued that what he classified as the five major racial groups (Australoid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Capoid, and Congoid) are actually separate "subspecies," each occupying "its own level on the evolutionary scale." His project was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation (the anthropology profession's principal source for research support), the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Air Force. Coon immediately became Southern segregationists' favorite social scientist, and he persisted disingenuously in claiming to be perturbed at having his work politicized.

Throughout the last century, racist narratives have fallen within the boundaries of intellectually acceptable opinion. While the earlier versions are cast away as unacceptable, the same evil lurks in current racial theories, though they are superficially less dissonant to contemporary ears.

The racist theories that have gained respectability in this century rely on claims regarding laws of nature, appealing to the imagery of an impersonal, sophisticated, and definitive science, rather than sheer prejudice, biblical injunction, or the like.

Two distinct forms of scientific racism coexist in mainstream American intellectual life. One is strictly biological. The other grew out of a sociohistorical strain of evolutionary theory that construed race as a blend of environmental and biological elements. (Henry Cabot Lodge's division of the world into groups defined by attitude is a perfect example of state-of-the-art sociohistorical racist theory.) In the 1930s, the biological concept began to displace the sociohistorical view.

Ironically, just as the biological view became dominant, frankly biology-based justifications for social hierarchy were put on the defensive by the Nazis' embarrassing exuberance for wedding biology and social policy. But presumptions of racial temperaments and character traits never went completely out of vogue. As late as 1939, the Quaker Oats Company published Dick Tracy's Secret Detective Methods and Magic Tricks, which began with a chapter on "Human Types" that characterized racial groups and subgroups and described the basic traits of each as well as its distinctive criminal behaviors. The chapter also gave tips on how to spot criminal types by their physical appearance.

After World War II, the evidence of the death camps and concern with U.S. competition for the hearts and minds of the nonwhite Third World combined to push much racial theory to the margins of respectability--except in the South. But progress was more apparent than real.

In postwar, liberal America, to qualify for public identification as a racist, one had to make specifically biological arguments justifying inequality. That explains the instant and lasting popularity of the "culture of poverty" and similar notions.

By the late 1950s, reactionaries like Harvard sociologist Edward Banfield were reintroducing new versions of sociohistorical racism into the intellectual mainstream--and distinguishing their arguments from narrow, biological definitions of race to cry foul against those who correctly identified the gambit. Banfield's colleague, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, rose to national prominence on the strength of two popular statements of the new sociohistorical racism. Beyond the Melting Pot, which proposed to explain social stratification in America in terms of group cultural attributes, and the nefarious 1965 Johnson Administration report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.

Although his intentions were quite different, anthropologist Oscar Lewis gave sociohistorical racism a powerful, sanitizing metaphor when he coined the term "culture of poverty." "Culture," which had previously stood for the principle of plasticity and contingency against "nature," seen as a region beyond human artifice, became just the opposite--a primordial realm that defines human populations by behaviors and attitudes and is resistant to social intervention.

Culture, that is, occupies the exact place that race did in the lexicon of earlier sociohistorical racism; what were "racial ideals" now are "cultural values." After all, even back then a defense against the appearance of bigotry was available by making allowances for exceptional individuals or subgroups. W.E.B. DuBois pointed out sociohistorical racialist theory's relatively open-ended view of the potential for improvement of inferior races.

That's why the old racist tracts resemble modern theory. It's also why Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein are emboldened to approach an argument for biological inferiority. Scientific racism has made a major comeback, in its sociohistorical guise, with "culture" as a stand-in for race. The step to biology is only a move within an evil framework that is already well established.

There are two lessons to be learned from the evolution of racist discourse. The more general one is that challenging racism on scientific grounds is never enough. Racism isn't principally about misinformation or anything else that can be remedied by getting to the "truth." Don't get me wrong, the truth is important--now more than ever, what with reborn biological theories of criminality and violence working their way into public policy.

But it's not enough to debunk the spurious claims of scientific racism. Race is always a political category, and can never be understood apart from a specific context. As DuBois succinctly put it, "The black man is a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia."

The real stakes of racism are political power and social hierarchy, and it can only be defeated on the terrain of explicit political struggle.

Secondly, history shows the folly of claiming, as the "new liberals" of the Clinton Administration and their academic lap dogs do, that we can best fight racism by pretending not to notice it. And the favor that Samuel Huntington, Joel Kotkin, and Charles Murray have found with the Clinton Administration makes it increasingly obvious that hypocrisy rather than folly is the operative defect.

Huntington has been one of a small group of academics invited to the White House to counsel Clinton. And after publication of his racist screed, Kotkin became a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, the Democratic Leadership Council's think tank, where he recently organized an issue of the house magazine, The New Democrat, on the theme "Getting Beyond Victimization"--a collection of victim-blaming injunctions to blacks, women, gays, and others to shut up and take responsibility for themselves. Murray's new line on the dangers of allowing even upper-status white women to have "illegitimate" babies has been quoted copiously by William Galston, political theorist, new communitarian, and White House policy adviser specializing in "family" policy.

Any questions about who's still in charge?