More Equal Than Others: America From Nixon to the New Century (review)

One moment in Godfrey Hodgson's More Equal than Others encapsulates both the book's strengths and limitations. In a chapter on the technological revolution, he writes: "I am writing this [book] looking out at the stone houses and a flock of sheep in a Costwold Village. Thanks to the internet I can call up U.S. government statistics, the websites of organizations, companies, associations of every kind. . . . I can have books sent to me from all over the world within days" (62). Despite his life in the trenches as a long-time British journalist and Washington correspondent for the Observer, Hodgson surveys his subject—the increasing tension between "equality of opportunity" and "equality of condition" in American society over the last 30 years—in panoramic form. The result is a useful, yet sometimes sprawling, synthetic history of deepening inequality since 1968.

In his brief introduction Hodgson, who claims to be skeptical of American exceptionalism, describes an "American character" molded by "immigration," "the frontier," "African slavery," and "the ideals of the American Revolution" (xx-xxi) into a "distinctly American pattern." The pattern, he says, is paradoxically flexible and dynamic, yet conservative and "haunted by the guilt and fear of racial conflict" (xxi). His book attempts to reconcile this deeper set of cultural patterns with an era of "unregulated American version of capitalism." Each succeeding chapter—with titles including "New Politics," "New Immigrants," "New Women," "New South, Old Race"—presents discrete respective histories, that Hodgson labors to connect.

Ultimately, according to Hodgson, it is the Johnson-era efforts to foster the conditions of equality—specifically desegregation and affirmative action—that led to the breaking point for the Liberal coalition, sowing seeds of our current political culture. He argues that profound cultural and demographic changes in the last 30 years in the United States have ultimately shaped the divisive political atmosphere that allowed this economic inequality. We are reminded, for instance, that recent immigration trends are reshaping the political map and that the women's movement was both divided by class (he emphasizes the "language of esteem" that prevailed as opposed to "wages and childcare" (156) and met with a conservative backlash in the 70s. And conservative forces have won out in the end, using populist rhetoric and the quiescent corporate media culture to their advantage. But weaving together these cultural and economic threads, or assigning cause and effect, is harder to achieve. Hodgson reiterates the familiar story of post-1968 America. Part of the Princeton's Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America series, Hodgson does little to engage more recent scholarship in that series—Robert O. Self's American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, for example—that reaches for the origins of postwar political culture in the period well before 1968, and partly in the limitations of the very Cold War Liberalism that Hodgson implicitly celebrates.

The core of Hodgson's argument can be found in chapters titled "New Technology," "New Economics" and "New Society." In these sections, Hodgson provides ample evidence regarding the rise of structured inequality. He demolishes the accepted wisdom about the 1990s boom as raising all boats, detailing the diminished power of unions, the shifting tax burden to the poor, and what he describes as the "myth" of the new economy and especially the "unique, liberating power of unregulated free-market capitalism" (108). In a similarly deflating chapter on the "New Technology," Hodgson counters the "myth" that the computer revolution was a product of "entrepreneurial capitalism" (64) and instead correctly traces the "revolution" to Cold War era "big government."

After cutting through the now painfully obvious free-market hype of the last decades, Hodgson's chapter on the "New Society" is the most persuasive, linking inequality with concrete spatial changes in the last 50 years: namely, suburbanization. Here too Hodgson might linger longer on the origins of this geography, a product of Liberalism's promise for white middle class Americans at the expense of...