Toward a More “Purple” U.S. Political History: Continuity and Consensus in Post-1960s Metropolitan America

“We keep talking about a housing crisis,” historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor said in a recent interview with The Nation. “Is it a crisis if it’s been in this state for the last hundred years?” She continued, “I don’t think it’s a crisis. I think this is housing under capitalism. It’s insecure, it’s unstable, it’s every person for themselves.” ¹ Some might quibble with Taylor’s framing, insisting that there are particulars and contingencies that make the contemporary housing crisis distinct from the prior post–World War II housing crises so exhaustively examined by urban historians. But Taylor’s suggestion of a cruel continuity, and specifically her gesturing toward a long history of federal government partnership with and privileging of the private sector around urban policymaking, is increasingly hard to dispute.

Kneejerk presumptions of periodization, fracture, and partisan difference in post-1960s U.S. political history threaten, as Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason Williams write in their new edited volume Shaped by the State, to “obscure deeper forms of consensus around global capitalism, white privilege, patriarchy, and notions of American exceptionalism” (p. 6). In other words, assumptions about political change, and especially ones that are tethered primarily to whether Democrats or Republicans are in office, risk keeping us ignorant of the real alliances and structures that nourish unequal power relations regardless of which political party dominates Congress.

Both Shaped by the State and James DeFilippis’s edited volume Urban Policy in the Time of Obama suggest the utility of continuity and consensus as an analytical lens for making sense of postwar U.S. urban policy, albeit in slightly different ways. Indeed, the two volumes make clear that urban policy is a fruitful site for tracking an alternative narrative of U.S. political power that disrupts too-neat histories of conservatism and liberalism. Contending that “crisis-centered frameworks” are themselves political constructions that “have made certain experiences and developments harder to see,” Cebul, Geismer, and Williams call for an analysis of the American state that decenters political parties or ideologies and instead focuses on the norms, assumptions, and values that fuel American governance (pp. 6-7). In doing so, the authors reveal an important cache of shared ideological investments that cut across ostensible partisan divisions, such as structural racism, governance through public–private partnerships, and support for capitalism, to name a few. For DeFilippis’s contributors, the continuity to struggle with is a “neoliberal consensus” codified among the urban planning elite in the 1990s that remained dominant in Obama’s urban policy initiatives, often to the detriment of the Obama administration’s reputation on urban affairs (p. 6).

The authors in Shaped by the State might take issue with Urban Policy in the Time of Obama’s ahistorical discussion of neoliberalism as an ideology that is historically distinct from postwar liberalism and politically contained in Democratic Party politics. Still, both books suggest broadly that historians of the postwar United States would do well to shed their engrained perceptions about partisan division and political transformation. To be sure, differences between liberals and conservatives did and continue to exist, and neither book advocates for the full collapse of those categories. But these volumes demonstrate that a focus solely on such political crisis and disjuncture mask critical sites of alliance across party lines that have led to the endurance and intensification of radically unequal power relations in an ostensibly “post-civil rights” era.

The intellectual and political motivations behind Shaped by the State spring from the increasing inability of either traditional scholarship on the ascent and fall of New Deal liberalism or on the rise of conservatism to account for many postwar Americans’ lived experiences. As the editors note in their Introduction, “Beyond Red and Blue: Crisis and Continuity in Twentieth Century US Political History,” a plethora of historical works exists by scholars who do not explicitly identify as political historians but whose work on the (re)production of racial capitalism and gender inequality reveal that suggest the inadequacy of a “red–blue binary” in the telling of postwar U.S. American history. Especially notable is their astute (and still underdiscussed) observation that a number of books that detailed the lives and politics of marginalized people in the United States were, in many ways, books that detailed the operation of American state power, even if they did not self-consciously seek to intervene into such conversations. At the same time, scholars focused explicitly on the innerworkings of the American state have discovered “durable patterns of governance” that “transcended episodic crises, administrations, realignments, and movements” and rendered the “liberalism-conservatism paradigm” incomplete (p. 10). Shaped by the State seeks to synthesize and draw new analytical frameworks from these two historiographical strains, which otherwise remain disconnected in their respective subfields. What they suggest is nothing short of a revolution in the history of U.S. political history, destined to encourage many among us to consider a wholesale upheaval of our 20th-century U.S. survey courses.

Insights culled from works in U.S. urban history served as some of the central catalysts for the new approaches outlined in Shaped by the State. As Matthew Lassiter notes in his “Ten Propositions for the New Political History,” urban history’s “metropolitan turn” helped generate the insights that prompted calls for pushing beyond the red–blue divide. Scholarship on the politics of metropolitan development, black resistance to racial segregation in housing and schools, and local white reactionary activism tracked “policy outcomes over electoral realignment” and detailed how both liberal and conservative regimes furthered racial and spatial inequality. Once unmoored from the misleading framework of “red–blue polarization,” the history of postwar metropolitan politics revealed an array of shared policies and norms around the sanctity of private property ownership, the presumed neutrality of free markets, and the institutionalization of white class privilege (p. 364). Urban historical literature on the carceral state has similarly disrupted tight narratives of partisan culpability for the contemporary crisis of racialized mass incarceration by revealing a long history of bipartisan collaboration in criminalizing blackness and in pursuing punitive law and order responses to poverty and political dissent (p. 365).

This intellectual debt to urban historical scholarship can be felt in numerous contributions to Shaped by the State. Brent Cebul and Mason Williams’s “Really and Truly a Partnership: The New Deal’s Associational State and the Making of Postwar American Politics” locates the shared political roots of both Sunbelt conservatism and urban liberalism in the “New Deal politics of partnership.” Cebul and Williams do not deny that there are distinctions between urban liberalism and Sunbelt conservatism, but they contend that both ideologies stem from the New Deal’s operation through partnership with local and private partners that “enabled local authorities to enjoy the benefits of federal spending while obscuring the national government’s authority” (p. 99). The New Deal state’s decentralized structure encouraged regional leaders and boosters to understand local development achievements as “evidence of the wisdom of localism” and to see their primary connection to the national state as one of competition for federal resources (p. 113). How this politics of partnership played out in regions across the country depended upon prior political cultures and institutions. But their point is that these varying regional ideologies were not “indigenous” but rather developed out of the New Deal’s institutional structure (p. 114). Shorn of a red–blue binary lens, Sunbelt conservatism’s antigovernment stance appears less about a principled stance against government intrusion—indeed, as Cebul and Williams show, Southern elites were some of the biggest beneficiaries of federal development dollars—and more the product of competition between regions that the New Deal’s federal policymaking structure incentivized. The South’s “frequent spams of antigovernment rhetoric,” they argue, “obscured their true and desired relationship with Washington, DC,” placing Southern elites alongside, rather in opposition to, urban liberals in the North and Midwest (p. 113).

Lessons from post-1960s neighborhood movements similarly suggest the need for better categories than liberal and conservative to fully capture the politics on the ground in the 1960s. In Suleiman Osman’s chapter, “Glocal America: The Politics of Scale in the 1970s,” he shows that groups as diverse as young white gentrifiers promoting DIY home redevelopment, radical African American and Latino activists fighting for neighborhood control, and white activists protesting federally mandated busing all shared a “disenchantment with large institutions” and the desire for greater community autonomy and control (p. 254). In doing so, Osman suggests that the so-called neoliberal turn toward privatization, self-determination, and decentralized authority does not have a coherent political origin in the left or the right, and instead developed through a “distinctly unsystematic and uneven process” that involves (and, perhaps, indicts) actors across the political spectrum (p. 255).

The very project of blurring the red–blue binary triggers sometimes uncomfortable realizations about the postwar liberalism that some scholars have previously framed as morally superior, if flawed and rife with internal contradictions, to modern conservatism. If conservatism and liberalism share a set of values, norms, and projects, and if the narrative about postwar liberalism is not one of the Democratic Party’s unfortunate usurpation by the rise of the Right, but rather its co-constitution of a harmful pro-market, white supremacist politics, what becomes of New Deal liberalism’s historical legacy? And what do such reconsiderations mean for making sense of neoliberalism, which is often alleged to represent a decisive break with New Deal liberalism’s practice of big government social provision triggered by growth liberalism’s political demise under the economic crises of 1970s and 1980s?

In answering these questions, the authors of Shaped by the State do not hold back—this is not your grandparent’s liberalism, one might say. N. D. B Connolly’s chapter, “The Strange Career of American Liberalism,” sets the tone by contending provocatively that, in fact, there is not much that is “neo” about neoliberalism. The tendency to see post-1970s liberalism’s ostensible turn toward privatization, punitive governance, and free market capitalism as “sharp breaks from liberalism’s better days,” Connolly argues, problematically masks the “stubborn durability of a racist, capitalist political culture” that has always been central to American liberalism (p. 64). More specifically, Connolly calls for understanding Jim Crow as liberalism, noting that if we examine liberalism in practice we find that it has always operated to ensure that white people have power and control over black citizens by empowering the market. As many scholars of the New Deal and metropolitan politics have long shown, but few have articulated as directly as Connolly has, the New Deal and Great Society liberalism institutionalized white supremacy by embedding private market redlining practices in their housing programs, excluding agricultural and domestic workers from social security, and by administering relief programs through local agencies, leading to the uneven distribution of those benefits to African American workers. The “utopia” of Keynesianism, therefore, was never a reality for African Americans living “the life and afterlife of Jim Crow.” Confronting such history, Connolly contends, calls into question the apparent novelty of neoliberalism. “How does one explain the ostensible newness of neoliberal market logics to a Jim-Crow era sharecropper,” he asks, “or the costs of fiscal austerity to a ‘colored only’ schoolteacher?” If anything, Connolly suggests, the discourse around neoliberalism indicates that more people are experiencing not some newly lamentable mutation of liberalism but rather the “black side of liberalism writ large, the blackening of the American polity as a whole” (p. 86).

Other chapters echo Connolly’s suggestion that there exists a powerful continuity between liberalism and neoliberalism—white racism and an uncritical belief in the purity of free markets—and further push the boundaries of how neoliberalism should be understood historically. Andrew Kahrl’s “The Short End of Both Sticks: Property Assessments and the Black Taxpayer Disadvantage in Urban America” discusses how the long history of tax overassessment of African American property owners suggests that many of the present unequal tax policies deemed “neoliberal” actually have their roots in the “administrative practices and prerogatives of the Jim Crow state,” which “bloomed” under postwar liberalism (p. 192). Kim Philips-Fein’s concluding reflection “The History of Neoliberalism” further meditates on the historical slipperiness of neoliberalism as an analytical category and raises similar questions about whether neoliberalism is, in fact, “neo” and whether it can adequately be attributed conservative or liberal origins. As she notes,

public-private partnerships, the use of the state to subsidize private enterprise and enforce market relationships, the celebration of individualism and property ownership as the route to general wealth and prosperity, the importance of business engagement in local affairs—all these can be seen as key elements of postwar liberalism even at its height. (p. 358)

The categorical blurriness, in terms of both the continuity between liberalism and neoliberalism and the recognition that much of what they stand for in practice aligns with white reactionary and conservative values, is a central contribution of Shaped by the State. Although by no means calling for a total end to analyses of neoliberalism as a distinct ideology, Philips-Fein suggests that freeing ourselves of misleading conceptual barriers and attending to neoliberalism “fraught rise”—or perhaps its disturbing familiarity—is urgently needed (p. 359). The stakes here are not merely the search for a more accurate history of postwar American politics, although Shaped by the State’s emphasis on examining American politics as they actually unravel on the ground, rather than through confining presumptions about what Republicans or Democrats “believe,” does just this. But connecting the dots between liberalism and neoliberalism, and those between liberalism and conservatism more broadly, matters because it makes legible the otherwise submerged norms, institutions, and structures that reinscribe hierarchies of difference and block the systemic transformation of power relations in the postwar United States. Such connections make U.S. historians better diagnosticians of American state power, and thus better agents for helping transform and/or dismantle them.

The authors in James DeFilippis’s Urban Policy in the Time of Obama make another compelling case for continuity as a lens for postwar U.S. history. They argue that Barack Obama’s urban policy agenda is best understood as a continuation of a prior bipartisan “neoliberal consensus.” Obama’s administration cannot claim to have innovated the neoliberal approach to urban policymaking, defined by an often contradictory “embrace of the market alongside the community,” but they certainly helped further entrench it. Notably, and in alignment with the authors of Shaped by the State, DeFilippis states at the outset that the consensus around neoliberalism transcends partisan boundaries, suggesting that narratives about how “divided and contentious Washington is” miss the mark when on probes the actual values, norms, and outcomes of federal urban policymaking in practice (p. 7). To be sure, Urban Policy in the Time of Obama details a few areas where Obama’s administration offered novel approaches to urban development that produced meaningful change. His administration’s massive investment in homelessness and their implementation of a “Housing First” approach led to national decreases in homelessness, especially for veterans, where the administration focused much of their efforts. Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development also made fair housing a “central objective,” leading to stricter requirements for local governments to spent federal housing and community development funds in ways that affirmatively further fair housing. Overall, however, Obama’s urban policy initiatives, the authors conclude, were “disappointing,” in large part because they continued in a neoliberal (or, as some authors of Shaped by the State might argue, just liberal) tradition of public–private partnerships, corporate tax breaks, and privatization of public schools, all of which worsened rather than ameliorated racial and economic inequality (p. 12).

In her particularly damning chapter on Obama’s education policy, for example, Pauline Lipman details at length how Obama’s neoliberal initiatives to replace public education with private charter schools and infuse education policy with business logics devastated communities of color while reaping enormous profits for private corporations. Although the book was published before President Donald Trump’s appointment of notorious school choice and privatization advocate Betsy DeVos to the Secretary of Education, Lipman’s discussion of Obama’s inarguably neoliberal education policies lends support to claims that that partisan affiliation is an unhelpful guide to interpreting federal policy preferences and outcomes. This is not to say that DeVos has not embarked on uniquely conservative and harmful initiatives, such as the Department’s recent assault on transgender students, its rescinding of an Obama-era rule that cracked down on for-profit colleges, and its adoption of anti-Semitism guidelines that clearly seek to stifle pro-Boycott Divestment Sanctions activism. But it does suggest that our analyses of state power in the post-1960s United States are better served by attending to these uncomfortable political and ideological alliances as they exist in policy and practice, rather than artificially constricting ourselves to the study of more visible partisan disagreements.

Although not self-consciously reflective on the questions that drive Shaped by the State and Urban Policy in the Time of Obama, Christina Rosan’s Governing the Fragmented Metropolis: Planning for Regional Sustainability serves as a case in point for examining how prior bipartisan investments in private property, capitalism, and local control continue to stymie more equitable and sustainable forms of urban development. With predictions of massive population growth and imminent (arguably already present) climate disaster, urban planners and policymakers increasingly urge for the rejection of metropolitan sprawl codified through New Deal housing and urban development policies. Through her study of regional planning institutions in the Portland, Boston, and Denver metropolitan regions, Rosan shows that regional planning is most effective at achieving goals of sustainability and equity when the regional planning entity not only creates a culture of collaboration with local stakeholders but also has clear “regulatory muscle.” Specifically, regional planning is most successful when the regional planning agency is also the Metropolitan Planning Organization, or the agency that controls the disbursement of transportation dollars to localities, and when it has the political authority to veto local plans that do not conform to regional goals. In other words, the regional planning entity needs to have real concrete power to coerce otherwise self-interested and historically exclusionary localities into taking sustainability and equity into account. Yet, as Rosan notes, most regional planning entities do not have this authority, relying instead on “consensus-based, capacity-building strategies that encourage stakeholders to come together to discuss regional goals” but that lack the power to exact any real penalties on recalcitrant localities (p. 173). While Rosan shows that voluntary models can sometimes achieve levels of influence, as is the case in Boston, such a structure pales in comparison with an agency that has regulatory teeth.

Although largely undiscussed by Rosan, the authors of Shaped by the State and Urban Policy in the Time of Obama show that the reasons for the unpopularity of strong regional planning systems are historical, deeply racialized, and not easily mappable along partisan lines. White suburban planners and constituents resist regional planning initiatives because they impinge upon the unearned land-use advantages that decades of bipartisan federal policymaking have created for white middle- and upper-class communities. As numerous urban historians have shown, these policies institutionalized white spatial privilege and property rights and made them resilient by creating a discourse that explained metropolitan disparities as the product of neutral and colorblind market forces, thereby narrowing the possibilities for regional coordination of metropolitan development. The architects and supporters of this fragmented and arguably white supremacist form of metropolitan governance clearly span the political spectrum, a fact that Rosan’s work demonstrates by showing that regional planning faces structural barriers even in decidedly liberal metropolitan regions. Forged by legislators and boosters of all political stripes, this distinctly shared political consensus around private property ownership, preference for local autonomy over zoning and development, and an uncritical belief in the benefits of free markets will continue to hamper the impact of even the most authoritative and radical regional plans.

Even if one argues that liberal governments are more likely to support equitable and sustainable regional planning, their failure to really critique and transform the market-oriented structure of urban development ensures that their efforts come up decidedly short. Indeed, Urban Policy in the Time of Obama discusses how one legacy of the Obama administration’s urban policymaking is its investment in regional planning, support for more comprehensive community initiatives, and promotion of interagency collaboration to tackle community revitalization. Yet, as Todd Swanstrom argues in “Incompleteness of Comprehensive Community Revitalization,” many of these initiatives, such as the Sustainable Communities Initiative or the Strong Cities, Strong Communities program, simply do not provide the funding necessary to implement regional plans or to sustainably assist historically disinvested neighborhoods. According to Swanstrom, “it’s almost as if the federal government were saying to distressed neighborhoods—if you just become sufficiently comprehensive and collaborative in your approach, you could all lift yourselves up into health neighborhoods. But this is simply not true.” He concludes by urging planners and legislators to ask question sure to resonate with urban historians: “Why is it that distressed neighborhoods require Herculean efforts at comprehensive policy collaboration to achieve healthy functioning?” Answering that question requires acknowledging the role of federal, state, and local policymakers of all political persuasions in creating racially marginalized concentrations of poverty, where black and brown communities are disproportionately underfunded, exploited, and punished. Swanstrom concedes that the Obama administration did more to recognize systemic inequality than other administrations. But he contends that Obama’s urban redevelopment initiatives ultimately did little to dismantle or transform the “underlying dynamics of neighborhood decline” and instead focused on comprehensive community initiatives that problematically suggest private, public, and nonprofit actors are all “equal partners” in community revitalization. As many contributors to DeFilippis’s volume show, public–private collaborations rarely result in more equitable outcomes precisely because private actors are motivated not by a genuine desire to end metropolitan inequality but rather are coerced into social equity projects by the promise of expanding their profits through tax breaks and returns on investment. Furthermore, as Swanstrom emphasizes, its federal actions, laws, and funding streams that establish both the unequal policy outcomes between various localities and that determine the power relations underlying the regional and community collaborations meant to fix them. Confronted with a dire economic crisis and a massive foreclosure disaster created by misbehavior from private finance capital, the Obama administration could have helped lead a shift in federal government policymaking away from relying on a clearly suspect private sector to spearhead remedies for the failures of private financial logics. Instead, his administration is a testament to the durability and continuity of bipartisan policy norms and logics that elevate market solutions and ultimately keep the white supremacist and economically unequal metropolis firmly in place.

Calls to focus on continuity and collaboration between Democrats and Republicans, rather than on partisan fracture, may feel discordant in our current Trumpian age. Even a cursory look at headlines on the relationship between Trump and his loyal Republican-dominated Senate and the Democratic-controlled House suggests a partisan battle of epic proportions. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi public tearing of President Trump’s State of the Union speech in 2020, which she called a “manifesto of mistruths” and which reflected the Democrats’ frustration with Republican intransigence in the impeachment trial, is a perfect embodiment of this tale of partisan warfare. Yet, if we shift our gaze just slightly toward particular areas of policy, a stealth alliance between Democrats and Republicans emerges. In 2019, Pelosi capitulated to tellingly bipartisan flank of Republican and Democratic moderates and dropped a provision that would have yielded stronger protections for migrant children in overcrowded border shelters. The bill had far more Republicans in favor than Democrats. To be sure, that Trump is president and that the Senate is majority Republican matters here. But Pelosi’s behavior is consistent with prior Democratic Party alliances around defense spending and immigration. Smashing the red–blue binary, then, appears even more urgent during our contemporary moment of apparently intractable partisan divide. Approaching the history of postwar United States free of assumptions about what constitutes liberalism or conservatism, and instead focusing these initially incongruous and politically uncomfortable points of convergence and collaboration, promises to produce sharper analyses of American state power and, in turn, more transformative movements to transform it.