The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy by Michael Hanchard

Princeton University Press, 2018

By Gabriel Paquette

Our age lends itself to jeremiads. Climate–change catastrophe looms for humanity. In America, the well-intentioned intelligentsia deplores the attenuation of social bonds. The gap separating rich from the poor has widened into a chasm. Economic mobility has stalled and the American Dream is now a chimera.

Doleful observations of national decline, cultural malaise and the deceleration of perceived progress are commonplace. What is new is the eschatology of American democracy’s demise. It is almost trite to lament its irreversible corrosion and corruption, wrought by a trinity of plutocrats, foreign wars, and a benighted demos. Coronavirus has revealed the sclerosis, venality, and brittleness of hallowed institutions. We are all Cassandras now.

In my life, I’ve preferred to interpret these phenomena as barbarous anomalies, legacies of our sordid past. Inimical to democracy, their eradication or evanescence would hasten the long-deferred realization of our democratic potential. Against this backdrop of well-meaning, Panglossian, liberal self-delusion, I recently re-read a book brimming with penetrating insights into our current predicament: Michael Hanchard’s The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy, published by Princeton University Press in 2018.

I originally reached for The Spectre of Race in the more parochial context of my academic research. Hanchard, a Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a remarkably lucid historical account of the development of Comparative Politics, a sub-field of Political Science, the origins of which fascinated me. But I returned to Hanchard’s book to situate America’s recent, intensive grappling with race and racism in its proper historical, international, and theoretical contexts.

The rudimentary question I brought to Hanchard’s book was, “what does America’s belated reckoning with race portend for its democracy?” This question, I now realize, is predicated on a view of American democracy as imperfect yet perfectible, flawed yet fixable. The paradigmatic case invoked in favor of this interpretation is the political history of Black Americans. Brought to these shores in chains and sold as chattel in the colonial era, independence from the British yoke brought neither solace nor emancipation. Deprived of citizenship in the new republic, the degraded status of Black Americans, the majority still enslaved, was codified in the Constitution. It took almost 80 years to abolish slavery. And yet one could argue, somewhat tendentiously, that the arc of American history bent toward democracy, from bondage to liberation to the incorporation of Black Americans into the body politic through constitutional amendments.

Even the smashing of Reconstruction, the instantiation of Jim Crow, and the unleashing of white supremacist terror against Blacks in the South, Indigenes in the West, and insurgents in the occupied extracontinental territories of Cuba and the Philippines was a long, somber prelude to national redemption of the civil rights movement. De facto (and sometimes legal) exclusion remained ubiquitous, often as pernicious as the blatantly racist statutes now rendered illegal. Yet progress toward democracy was palpable and measurable. Several decades later, America elected a Black President. Few credibly believed that America had become a “post-racial” society, but the Obama Presidency brought the nation full circle. It symbolically removed the original sin of slavery and revived faith in the nation’s capacity for amelioration through the ballot box. At last, American democracy was unshackled without recourse to a latter-day Spartacus or Toussaint L’Ouverture.

There was no paucity of countervailing evidence to dampen such optimism, of course. Even a casual observer would have noted the pervasive vilification and deportation of migrants, particularly Latinos; the virulent anti-Muslim prejudice linked to America’s occupation of Baghdad and Kabul; and the counterinsurgency-inspired policing of majority Black communities resulting in the incarceration, en masse, of Black men. Yet the image of redeemed American democracy, largely unencumbered by its racial baggage, remained seductive even as it strained credulity.

Triumphalism proved premature. Voter suppression is a professed plank of the governing political party’s platform. Quotidian surveillance and persecution of citizens of color by still-unreconstructed law enforcement agencies remain the norm (even if sparking greater outrage than in the past). White nationalist irredentism is mainstream, its partisans eagerly standing by and barely standing back.

Fringe has become conventional. When Patrick Buchanan spoke to the Republican National Convention in 1992—“we must take back our cities, take back our culture, and take back our country”—he had received 22% of the vote in the primaries. Now his prejudices inform federal policy, cheered on by “identitarians” and advocates of ethnic cleansing, who have been given carte blanche, as it were. In the wake of Charlottesville, a Washington Post/ABC News survey found that 9% of Americans thought it was fine to hold neo-Nazi or white supremacist views. When Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City in 1995, it seemed probable that the “patriot” militia movement, embracing conspiracy theories and rejecting the legitimacy of the federal government, would retreat to the shadows. Now they operate in broad daylight, brazenly brandishing their weapons on the steps of state capitols.

My second reading of The Spectre of Race made clear the originality and pertinence of Hanchard’s treatment of the role of race (and its forerunner concepts) in the development of democracy, from Athens to the present. Hanchard contends that “autochtony, designed to naturalize and restrict membership in the Athenian polity, became the prototypical form of differentiation intended to rationalize limitations upon citizenship or formal membership in the political community”. In this way, Hanchard argues, “legal, juridical, and institutional empowerment of citizens has been dynamically related to limiting second-class citizens or prohibiting noncitizens from access to citizenship.” Hanchard cogently shows that race became the equivalent of, and gradually supplanted, the concept of autochtony in modern western democracies.

Racial and ethno-national hierarchy has served to justify political inequality and restrict participation on the presumption that distinct groups could not play the same roles and occupy the same positions in a single polity. Exclusion, disenfranchisement, and racial difference, in Hanchard’s account, are the foundations of, not barriers to, democratic politics. Our infatuation with the ethos of democracy has blinded us to ethnos undergirding it. Democracies neither survive in spite of these rebarbative practices nor have the capacity to overcome them. Instead, democracy is premised upon and remains inseparable from them.

The quest for redemption by expurgation of the ethnos is quixotic. To ask how racism has undermined democracy is, then, a poorly framed question. All democracies have excluded or delimited the political participation of certain groups or classes. In fact, the putatively most successful democracies—the US, Britain, and France—were major imperial powers, whose dominance was predicated on an ideology of racial difference. This 19th-century and 20th-century experience, it should be noted, ran counter to the expectation of 18th-century writers, such as Adam Ferguson and Edmund Burke, who warned that overseas empire would hasten political and moral corruption in the metropole. A similar model of cause-and-effect informed the actions of abolitionists, who averred that slavery abroad undermined freedom at home. Yet the intimate connection between the flowering of democracy in the metropole and oppression overseas was exactly what Marx perceived when he noted that “to be free at home, [Britain] must enslave abroad”. It is more apposite to ask, then, whether democracy’s reliance on ethno-national hierarchies can ever be transcended without destabilizing democracy itself.

In The Spectre of Race, Hanchard cogently argues that the field of Comparative Politics has been blind to its intellectual heritage. The spectre of race haunts the field. The founders of the sub-discipline, long forgotten even as their ideas became embedded in the concepts and methods of its present-day practitioners, were “devoted to marshaling evidence proving that racial and ethno-national history was central to modern political development and institutions.” Race was the “key variable” in explaining institutional variation across the societies.

There were good reasons to jettison these 19th-century progenitors, whether Oxford’s Edward Augustus Freeman or Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson, whose approach was, in Hanchard’s memorable formulation, “the product of an embarrassing union of scientific ardor and normative promiscuity.” Yet the effort to purge methods and deracinate foundational questions proved futile. Even the most vigilant positivists could not deracialize Comparative Politics.

The polities of Western Europe and the United States were presented as models for non-European states to emulate. The hierarchy of states in the international order was based on the purported maturity of their political institutions. Democracy was posited as the highest stage of development, ignoring (however unwittingly) that democracy itself depended on racial hierarchies, regimes of exclusion and marginalization, and the projection of imperial power. This became the paradox at the heart of Comparative Politics. As Hanchard puts it, “the race concept’s obsolescence did not render ethnocentrism obsolete.”

All of this casts doubt on the wisdom of the policy prescriptions that emerge from Comparative Politics scholarship. This includes the democracy promotion and exportation business that boomed in the Cold War and in subsequent decades, now inseparable from the calamities wreaked by the application of such ideas by neoconservatives. But the most urgent question arising from my second helping of Hanchard’s book is whether democracy should be salvaged and revitalized at all. Can democracy be reformed to overcome its intellectual inheritance? If not, then is it better to imagine and struggle for a post-democratic politics, one founded on a basis other than racial difference and ethnonational hierarchy? Hanchard coaxes the reader in this tantalizing if disquieting direction. Yet, he does not hurl us into a political abyss; rather, he points us toward a path out of it.

Gabriel Paquette is a Professor of History at the University of Oregon. He is the author of several books, including The European Seaborne Empires: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Age of Revolutions (Yale University Press, 2019).