Response to Karen Orren

Abstract

Karen Orren's critique wages more war with itself than it does with my main arguments and evidence, most of which she does not engage directly. The bulk of my essay was devoted to textual critiques of Tocqueville, Myrdal, Hartz, and a number of more recent authors. I argued that their assumptions that liberal democratic traditions formed the core of American political culture led to inadequate accounts of major systems of ascriptive hierarchy, especially racist, nativist, and patriarchal ones. Orren mentions none of the authors I critiqued except Carol Pateman, whom she invokes in a paragraph ending, like a third of her paragraphs in her first two sections, with a rhetorical question about my view, not a forthright contrary proposition. Her failure to address my specific critiques, and her recurring reliance on questions to do the work of affirmative arguments, make it unclear precisely how far she is defending the authors, challenging the criticisms, and disputing the evidence to which my essay was largely devoted.