The Eclipse of Equality: An Interview with Solon Simmons

Welcome to Voices. This is our first program in Unrest Magazine’s new audio series.  Voices is a space where Unrest gets to speak with scholars, activists, practitioners and others we find interesting and relevant to the conflict resolution project.  Our first guest on the program is Solon Simmons.  He is the author of the recent book, The Eclipse of Equality: Arguing America on Meet the Press, which is out now on Stanford University Press.  Dr. Simmons is an Associate Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University.  He is best known for his insights on American politics and frequently appears on Al-Jazeera and CTV.  Please join us for the next hour while we discuss his book, the recent government shutdown, the role of social science and its impact on conflict resolution today.

Listen to the full interview here and read excerpts below.

On the title of the book, The Eclipse of Equality:

Solon Simmons: We’ve changed what we mean when we say equality.  Really, one of the ways to read the thesis is to say, “When you reference the word equality what do you mean?”  Are you referring primarily to what we call ascribed characteristics [race, gender, sexuality] or are you thinking more about what it means to be equal when we are all in this together?  That’s the easiest way to put it.  Another way to put it is to say, when we reference equality what you would have meant in the four decades around 1900, is something like we want everyone to have a chance to be successful in life and what you really would have meant is except or unless you have these certain characteristics.  Which meant you are not a person who is white, or not a man, and so on.  But equality, at least within that limited sphere, that ascribed sphere of white men was the sense that everyone is in this together and we all ought to have a chance.  So one of the ways to think about what it means to have an “eclipse of equality” is that the word itself has changed in our meaning.  We no longer think about property.  We no longer think about equality of economic opportunity per se unless it’s attached to one of these other ascribed characteristics…Within those groups [groups recognized through ascribed characteristics] you’ve got massive inequality and the within group inequality is the thing we are no longer seeing.  Which is what it means to be all in this together.  One way to think about it is what does it mean to have differentiation on the basis of individuals and another way is to say consider everyone together within those groups. There’s this massive inequality and its getting worse.

On the recent U.S. government shutdown:

…It was a situation driven very much by the fact that we have this massive problem [inequality] that’s emerging and we don’t address it in any direct way.  And by not addressing it or perhaps even by addressing it in other ways, let’s say we have an economic problem and we deal with it by cultural reconciliation.  The cultural reconciliation isn’t necessarily addressing the problem that a lot of the people who are freaking out are feeling and it might actually exacerbate their sense of anxiety, because many of the people who are in this problem, let’s say the white working class voter who is no longer voting with the Democratic Party.  That person in fact might start to feel that their world is falling apart at even a faster rate because even the things I took for granted are now no longer there.  And they might not be opposed to them per se.  They may say, I’m not a sexist, I’m not a racist and what have you, but nevertheless, boy this is different and the whole world is falling apart and I don’t know what it is…

On using Meet the Press as an object of inquiry:

Where are the arguments happening where the theorizing about public events is happening in a way that is directly connected to policy?  And it’s the Beltway [Washington, D.C.].  It’s the discourse of the ruling class if you will – not in a Marxist sense in this case but it could be – but in a sense of a group of people who are in fact the rulers.  Congress people, sometimes Supreme Court judges, CEOs, Senators – the most common among Congress, and other opinion leaders who are somehow in this whim.  Those ruling ideas were the thing I really cared about and so what I was doing was checking how people articulate these ideas in this kind of authoritative setting against what I’m seeing.  And I thought, why not just write about the ground in which I’m checking the scale itself and so I decided to write the book.  And what I think you’ve got in the book is a critical history of the conventional wisdom.

On the role of the social scientist today:

We play a special role.  We are trained to pay attention to objective features of social science data, to interrogate those data, to make sense of them, and then to share what we know with the public.  I don’t think what we are doing is to create a conversation among a very small group of people who have a set of interests like I just mentioned.  So you have these interests and so do all your friends.  You get in influential positions in the field and you edit journals and a book series and so on and then you determine what is going on.  No, I think instead the social scientist ought to be attentive to the problems he or she sees in society and therefore, there ought to be a diverse array of political views represented in the academy.  That’s the other feature.  You actually need to have a variety of political views, and therefore you cover the entire range.

For more on The Eclipse of Equality see:

The Page 99 Test – http://page99test.blogspot.com/2013/05/solon-simmons-eclipse-of-equality.html

When he finds the time in his busy schedule Solon blogs at his website Confrontations.