Manufacturing Decline, by Jason Hackworth (introduction)

M A N U FA C T U R I N G DECLINE How Racism and the Conservative Movement Crush the American Rust Belt

JASON HACKWORTH

INTRODUCTION Organized Deprivation in the American Rust Belt

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the backdrop of racial denial and stingy responses to urban poverty, the Kerner Commission Report of 1968 is an extraordinary document in American history.ď›œ The report was commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson to provide an autopsy of the previous summer of violence, when uprisings exploded in 159 U.S. cities. The commission met with hundreds of city leaders and residents, read thousands of document pages, and reviewed the history of race relations in the United States. They focused on the neighborhoods where violence during the summer of 1967 was most intense and tried to understand what sparked it. Their conclusions were incredibly bold.

In perhaps the most unvarnished passage, the commission wrote: GAINST

Certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fun-

damental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans

toward black Americans. Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively in the past; it now threatens to do so again. White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.ď˜ş

This was not a document written by critical race theory professors at UC Berkeley or black militant leaders in Detroit. Most

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members of the committee were white, and many had held elected office at some point in their careers. Some were even self-professed conservatives. They understood the toxic racial dynamic in the United States, and they wrote this honest take on conditions anyway. Perhaps even bolder than their racial honesty were their policy recommendations. They argued that previous efforts to address concentrated, highly racialized poverty—urban renewal, the War on Poverty, the Model Cities Program, etc.—had been inadequate to the task, not because they were philosophically flawed but because they were underfunded. The commission argued for major reinvestments in extant programs, passage and muscular enforcement of fair housing and employment opportunities, and major outlays to schools and educational initiatives.

Above all, they argued for a response that was “on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems.” The Kerner Report was big, bold, and unusual.

It is safe to say that President Johnson was incensed by the report. Politically weakened by the escalation of the Vietnam War and social upheaval, Johnson did not have the political capital to advance such an agenda through Congress and was enraged that his handpicked committee had put him in this position. He worried even more that the commission’s conclusions and recommendations would hasten the flight of southern and rural whites from the Democratic Party—and he was prescient to worry about this. Kerner and the social upheavals it documented provoked an angry, multifaceted backlash. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated less than six weeks after the report was released. George Wallace, an openly segregationist presidential candidate, won five southern states and shockingly high vote percentages in counties surrounding conflict-ridden cities like Cincinnati, Detroit, Gary, and Dayton later that year. Richard Nixon openly ran against the document, sneering that it “blame[d] everyone except the rioters,”

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and won the presidency. Perhaps more important for the longer term, Nixon began the process of bottling white racial anxiety for conservative benefit. He would master these techniques by 1972 and go on to rout his opposition.

Fifty years after Kerner, the political ethos and range of potential policy solutions for urban decline and poverty could not be more different. The very same neighborhoods chronicled in Kerner are now poorer, as racially isolated (or more), and more poorly serviced than they were in 1968. Kerner was grand, compensatory, and empathetic, while today’s policy suite for distressed urban spaces is austere, penal, and filled with accommodations to a mythical market that left these areas a generation ago. The belief that government spending failed (or even caused) the problems of urban decline is now so popularly accepted that conservatives openly mock the conclusions of the famous document. Jason Riley, a fellow of the Manhattan Institute, used the fiftieth anniversary of Kerner in 2018 to mock progressives for “blaming everything on racism.” “We can’t hope,” he wrote, to address effectively the social pathology on display in so many black ghettos by playing down the role of culture and personal

responsibility so as to keep the focus on white racism. What

blacks were doing on their own to develop human capital and to

narrow racial gaps in the first half of the 20th century has a far better record of success than any government program. This his-

tory is seldom discussed among politicians in search of votes or activists in search of relevance, but it ought to be part of any serious national debate about racial inequality today.

Riley, like most conservatives, sees racial inequality as the residue of cultural inferiority. White people have better economic

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outcomes and live in more prosperous places because they are more invested in the nuclear family, education, and the Protestant ethic. Government programs—other than the carceral state— cannot hope to address these concerns. Only tough love, selfhelp, and deprivation will work.

It would be tempting to dismiss such sentiments as the cold ravings of a conservative think-tank ideologue if they were not also the de facto policy frame for what counts as urban policy today in the United States. The notion that the social economy— services for the poor, public housing, etc.—has failed and should be dismantled is effectively axiomatic in many state legislatures and the federal government. The only service increases that federal and state officials propose today are for police officers and prisons. Many state and federal officials, particularly in the Rust Belt, continue to successfully run against the ostensibly excessive spending of cities like Detroit and Cleveland, even though these spaces have the poorest services and lowest spending per capita in their states. Local responses are more mixed, but with limited resources, the main local “policy innovations” have been measures to literally downsize cities, rationalize and reduce expenses, and appear accommodating to real estate investors. If the urban renewal period was marked by a series of unkept promises, the current period is marked by unmade promises. No one is promising to build better spaces with public money or to improve social services. They are instead promising to tear down houses, rationalize services, write off whole neighborhoods, and lubricate the wheels of future land investment. If the core suggestion of Kerner was to target the most deprived neighborhoods with services and enforcement against predation, the prevailing policy ethos fifty years later is effectively the opposite. Urban-policy scholars openly muse about giving up on the most deprived neighborhoods and focusing on those that have “market potential.” City officials give hopeful labels to such activities, like “rightsizing,” but these terms

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do not meaningfully differ from the more pejorative label “triage.” The Kerner Commission was proposing an organized reinvestment in isolated, poor, black neighborhoods, but most policy voices today are arguing for what amounts to an organized deprivation of already deprived spaces. Organized deprivation involves direct state actions to reduce social welfare, liberate corporations from local regulation, and punish “unruly” people. Pointing out the dominance of such ideas within the contemporary urban-policy ethos is, of course, not a novel observation, but the persistence of such efforts does provoke questions that are not easily answered. First, organized deprivation is deeply unpopular. The rightsizing efforts of the last ten years are not the first incarnations of triage. Triage has been proposed numerous times in the past seventy-five years. The idea that certain neighborhoods were beyond repair justified their destruction during urban renewal. In the 1970s, New York City’s chief planner proposed a “planned shrinkage” of neighborhoods that were already losing population. A city councilor in Detroit made a similar proposal in 1993. Aspects of these proposals vary, but they share one common characteristic: they were deeply unpopular to those living in the affected neighborhoods. Proponents have been publicly castigated for at best ignoring, at worst destroying, deprived communities of color. If such ideas are expressed in the abstract, without maps identifying targeted neighborhoods, the reaction remains reasonably muted. But when neighborhoods targeted for downsizing or removal are identified, the reaction is usually hostile. This provokes a basic question: If such proposals are so politically toxic—and they are—why do they continue to be proposed? The wave of rightsizing proposals have all occurred in the past ten years. If local voter support means anything to generally risk-averse politicians, why even propose such measures given their toxic legacies? What explains the durability of triage within a more or less democratic system?

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The second curious dimension of such proposals is their impermeability to evidence of past failure. The efforts to eradicate “blight” during urban renewal have been mercilessly critiqued for failing to achieve their central objectives. Urban renewal destroyed the functioning communities it was supposed to save. Mass demolition was supposed to create a tabula rasa for development but instead created thousands of vacant lots still devoid of development. New York’s planned shrinkage efforts closed firehouses and medical facilities and succeeded only in increasing incidents of arson, AIDS, tuberculosis, and low birth weights. The canard that deregulation will invite productive capital into deprived neighborhoods has also led to measurable failure. Directing development incentives at “hopeful” neighborhoods has merely hastened the demise of “moribund” ones in the same city and has had little effect even in the targeted neighborhoods. Deregulating the tax-foreclosure process to attract capital has merely invited more predatory investors to flood deprived neighborhoods with contract mortgages and other deceptive products. Deregulating mortgage markets as a way to provide better access for deprived communities simply led to financial predation that ended in disaster. Current efforts to downsize, rationalize, and marketize distressed urban spaces have direct antecedents. And those antecedents have, by and large, failed miserably at the very tasks that they purport to achieve. Why are such policies so impervious to past failures? How can local officials tenably frame such efforts with hopeful arguments that they will lead to the city’s rebirth when they have so clearly failed to do so in the fairly recent past?

THE PRODUCTION OF URBAN POLICY Before addressing this applied question, it is necessary to ask a more general one: How does any urban policy get made?

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Conventional understandings of urban-policy production tend to focus on the actions of elected leadership and their interactions with local capital. The ostensibly good-faith search by elected leadership to maximize the public interest is balanced against a self-serving drive to enhance profitability from business interests (who pressure elected leadership). This broad approach is valuable for certain applications, namely understanding land-development activity within a given municipality. But this approach is weaker at understanding policy where there does not appear to be any constituency that benefits directly, or where the proposed policy is so impervious to past failures. It is thus of limited use for understanding the current policy regime in declining cities.

This book adopts a different approach to understanding urbanpolicy production—one that is typically less common in the study of urban politics. Much of what we consider “urban” policy is in fact dictated by higher levels of government and private institutions that do not reside in the city in question. Despite the strong mythos of “local control,” policy is often handed down by the state and federal levels. This can include but is not limited to resource limits and contingencies, legal boundaries on local implementation, and preemption laws. A remarkable convergence has formed around a core set of neoliberal ideas that stress a small social state, deregulated market conditions, and intensified penality for individuals and cities who reject these constraints. A parallel set of political theorists have thus emphasized the need to understand the broader ideas on which policy is based rather than the relatively slight differences in local implementation. Fred Block and Margaret Somers argue that certain ideas gain “epistemic privilege” and become even more influential than localized selfinterest or median-voter wishes. These ideas percolate through policy construction at all levels, creating both a positive vision of what policies are acceptable and—equally importantly—a negative vision of what policies are politically unrealistic.

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Ideational scholars have directed the idea of epistemic privilege to study the shift away from Keynesian managerialism toward neoliberalism. David Harvey was among the first to note the erosion of what he deemed Keynesian-managerialist ideas in the 1970s. Within this narrative, the Keynesian-managerial state had to reproduce the conditions for capital accumulation, but it did so more from the position of referee for rather than direct participant in the capitalist process. At the federal level, this included more vigorous bank regulations, antimonopoly protections, and labor laws. At the local level, it meant that cities served more as arbiters between different development interests than as entrepreneurs trying to lure developers. Market forces were “embedded” within local and national democracies—that is, corporations and investors had to adhere to a set of democratically derived limits on their activities. These ideas were supported by the economic conditions of the time (growth), theory (Keynes and his followers), and supportive institutions (the Democratic Party and its think-tank organs like the Brookings Institution), but this began to change in the 1970s when Keynesian ideas fell into disrepute and were increasingly replaced by a neoliberal model. Within the neoliberal paradigm, local governments are converted into competitors with one another. The goal of this model was (and remains) to accommodate rather than regulate capital. Internal governance was rebuilt around this model—running government like a business and offering a deregulated clean slate for capital was the goal.

Markets are increasingly liberated—“disembedded” to use Karl Polanyi’s language—from democratically derived regulation. A key question is why and how did such a momentous shift occur? There are three overlapping schools of thought on this matter: structuralism, institutionalism, and hybrid approaches.

For Harvey and other structuralists, the source of this shift lies in the structural conditions that support each model. During the

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immediate postwar period, when Keynesian managerialism was thriving, the United States was growing rapidly. With Germany and Japan still rebuilding, America’s industrial power was largely unchallenged for a generation. Cities, states, and the federal government could adopt a more interventionist posture because there was so much profitability in the broader system. The federal government could and did redistribute a great deal of this largesse to cities to build major infrastructure. Cities within this model could referee and allocate this windfall. The need to enhance an individual city’s competitive position was not as acute as it would later become. This set of structural conditions lasted until the economic crisis of the 1970s, sparked by massive Vietnam War debt, an OPEC oil embargo, and major competitive pressures from Germany and Japan. It led to stagflation (the combination of inflation and high unemployment) and the erosion of Bretton Woods—the WWII-era system of international finance centered exclusively on the American dollar. With resources scarcer, government at all levels shifted to an austerity-first model. Institutionalists adopt many of the same assumptions but emphasize a different element—the role of powerful groups in advancing ideas of neoliberalism and austerity, starting in the 1960s. As Jason Stahl points out, the most powerful think tank in the United States during the mid-twentieth century was the Brookings Institution. Brookings served several roles—it worked out the intricacies of policy and legislation for the Democratic Party and promoted ideas supportive of the New Deal Keynesian coalition. The Republican Party and its ideas of self-help, small government, and low taxes had no equivalent vessel to disseminate and support its ideas. But this began to change in the late 1960s. Many point to the role of the seminal Powell Memorandum of 1971. In a memo entitled “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” retired Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell

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offered a blistering critique of a dubiously conflated series of threats—communism, fascism, and the New Deal. Powell argued that corporate leaders should be more directly political—should create think tanks, donate to political figures, and run for political office—to support a deregulatory agenda. Scholars of conservatism consider the Powell Memo a blueprint for the conservative movement, as it inspired the establishment or expansion of a powerful army of think tanks. Today, there is no equivalent on the Left to the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute, and American Enterprise Institute, or Fox News. These organizations successfully promote conservative ideas and contest alternative perspectives. Thus, when policy ideas are debated, an asymmetric war for epistemic privilege drives policy construction more than the wishes of the local electorate.

The third school of thought is a hybrid of the first two. Here, theorists have sought to understand how the combination of institutions and economic conditions produced the shift toward neoliberalism. Mark Blyth, in particular, argues that paradigm shifts are rare because the gravitational pull of past institutional pathways is strong. For such a shift to occur, two conditions must be met: first, a politicoeconomic shock that the prevailing paradigm cannot solve and, second, the availability of a sufficiently developed alternative approach. Blyth’s comparative study of Sweden and the United States shows that the shock of the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Great Depression created a set of conditions and misery that laissez-faire economics could not solve. Economists in the United States, the UK, and smaller countries like Sweden began theorizing a justification for a more interventionist state apparatus that could avoid or solve such crises more effectively. Political figures and institutions followed by adopting and appointing adherents of this approach to government posts. Once implemented and demonstrably

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successful at smoothing out the business cycle, such ideas became even more foundational. The Keynesian paradigm was held intact by conditions of growth until the 1970s, at which point a reversal occurred. The shock challenged the putative ability of Keynesian approaches to solve it, and conservative groups had been developing an alternative model in the political wilderness for years.

When charismatic political figures like Reagan and Thatcher came to power, they implemented this alternative approach as rapidly as they could. Governance at all levels was affected.

These are powerful narratives, and I adopt many of their assumptions, particularly the notion that local or urban policy is constrained and at times even determined by much wider nonlocal paradigms. But such theories are limited by their strict materialist emphasis—the conditions and ideas ostensibly of greatest importance are purely economic. The central characters are corporations and conservative economists who were motivated by high taxes and sluggish growth. Other social conflicts and movements are not seriously considered within most such narratives.

I certainly do not refute that economic events and motivations are important, but I part from the assumption they fully explain the transition to the current policy paradigm. I argue that the social crises of the 1960s (namely white reaction to black political progress) are equally (and in some cases more) important as the economic shocks of the 1970s. This book seeks to build from the insights of the ideational school of policy production but to incorporate a more robust consideration of racial reaction and local conditions into the analysis. I seek to foreground the role of racial reaction in the transition toward the neoliberal mode of governance and to highlight the pernicious outcomes this mode has had for declining cities in the American Rust Belt.

By foregrounding race, I do not mean to suggest that it is the only factor involved in the transition toward organized

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deprivation. I seek only to counter those who argue that race is not a factor, and to complement those scholars who simply do not invoke race or do not adequately explain why it is a factor.

Arguments that emphasize race have been applied in the past to the issues such as incarceration, but comparatively less literature explores how race is crucial in the construction of neoliberal urban policy or the incidence of urban decline. This book attempts to fill this void by exploring how organized deprivation is rooted in both the economic crisis of the 1970s and the social upheavals of the 1960s. The topical focus is on the shrinking cities of the Great Lakes industrial region, but the intent is to gesture to and inform wider economic, social, and ideational change.

ORGANIZED DEPRIVATION Figure 0.1 is a schematic summary of this book’s argument. In short, a multifaceted, multiscalar policy reaction among urban decline, racial threat, and the conservative movement has

Urban Decline +

+

The Conservative Movement

Racial Threat

Organized deprivation: - austerity - limiting local autonomy - disembedding the market - punishing unruly people

+

FIGURE 0.1 The

production of deprivationist urban policy in the American Rust Belt.

Jason Hackworth offers a powerful critique of the role of Rust Belt cities in American political discourse, arguing that antigovernment conservatives capitalized on—and perpetuated—these cities’ misfortunes by stoking racial resentment. He traces how the conservative movement has used the imagery and ideas of urban decline since the 1970s to advance austerity and punitive policies. Weaving together analyses of urban policy, movement conservatism, and market fundamentalism, Manufacturing Decline highlights the central role of racial reaction in creating the problems American cities still face.

“Manufacturing Decline is a sobering yet essential read for anyone who is interested in the fate of America’s inner cities. This recovery of the politics behind—and, indeed, that created—the devastating decline of key cities such as Detroit is deeply unsettling but ultimately uplifting. As Jason Hackworth makes clear, just as America’s inner cities can be deliberately unmade to serve the political agenda of conservatives, so might they be remade in ways that could actually benefit all citizens equally.”

— HEATHER ANN THOMPSON, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BLOOD IN THE WATER: THE ATTICA PRISON UPRISING OF 1971 AND ITS LEGACY “Manufacturing Decline implicates conservative thought leadership, anti-urban interests, and elite—and ordinary—laissez-faire racism in a deliberate, decades-long degradation of U.S. cities via privation, demolition, and desertion. It is a thoughtful, stimulating, and efficient read at the intersection of urban geography, planning, and the social sciences.”

— MICHAEL LEO OWENS, AUTHOR OF GOD AND GOVERNMENT IN THE GHETTO: THE

POLITICS OF CHURCH-STATE COLLABORATION IN BLACK AMERICA “Manufacturing Decline convincingly argues that, while the disappearance of manufacturing jobs affected Rust Belt cities, their decline was not inevitable.

Jason Hackworth provides a marvelous exposition of how this decline was largely produced by the rise of neoliberal policies emphasizing free markets while deliberately overlooking the region’s long history of racial disparities.”

— REYNOLDS FARLEY, COAUTHOR OF DETROIT DIVIDED JASON HACKWORTH is a professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (2007) and Faith Based: Religious Neoliberalism and the Politics of Welfare in the United States (2012).

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK cup.columbia.edu Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover photo: Abandoned House, Detroit. © Kevin Bauman Printed in the U.S.A.