Rainbow Coalition

Rainbow Coalition is the passage’s name for a liberal politics organized around a coalition of single-issue struggles—and the point from which it argues for a more unlikely alliance. By invoking the image of reaching over the rainbow, the text asks readers to look past the familiar divide between tolerant liberalism and religious conservatism and consider where resistance to global capitalism may actually arise.

Meaning and Political Use

The expression refers here not to a general ideal of social inclusion but to a specific strategy attributed to radical liberals: linking separate, single-issue campaigns into a rainbow coalition. The passage treats that strategy as insufficient when it becomes a boundary around political imagination. Its challenge is to reach beyond the coalition’s established ground and recognize religious fundamentalism as a possible ally against global capitalism.

The rainbow image carries the argument’s turn. The passage draws on the popular song associated with The Wizard of Oz to frame a movement beyond the familiar coalition, not a celebration of the coalition as an endpoint. The proposed crossing is politically uncomfortable by design: the potential ally is described as the apparent enemy of multicultural liberalism.

The Conservative-Liberal Reversal

The argument is prepared by a contradiction in moral conservatism. Conservatives condemn liberal permissiveness while supporting the unbridled capitalist economy that, in the book’s account, produces that culture. Their fight against an external enemy therefore also confronts a consequence of their own position. The passage identifies this as the cultural contradiction of capitalism: economic support for consumer freedom coexists with moral opposition to its cultural effects.

The fall of the Berlin Wall sharpens the irony. The regimes of Eastern European communism were overthrown by forces that included youth culture, intellectuals of the 1960s, and workers who still favored Solidarity over individualism. At a conference, Robert Bork objected to Michael Jackson’s crotch-clutching Super Bowl performance. Another panelist answered that the desire to enjoy such American cultural manifestations had helped bring down the wall. Bork recognized the irony, but the passage argues that he missed its deeper implication: the consumer culture he deplored had been part of the force that defeated the political order he opposed.

The Coalition as a Political Symptom

The passage then reverses the usual picture of political antagonism. In Jacques Lacan’s account of communication, a speaker receives their own message back from another in inverted form; here, conservative populists return to liberals an image of liberalism’s own hypocrisy. The furious Kansas redneck, apparently the ultimate enemy of liberal tolerance, becomes a symptom through which liberals encounter what their own position fails to acknowledge. The Rainbow Coalition marks the limits of an alliance that may leave this antagonism—and the economic order shaping it—unexamined.

This reading does not simply declare religious fundamentalists progressive or dissolve the conflict between them and liberals. It identifies some deeply religious movements as crucial sites of resistance to global capitalism and asks liberals to recognize a possible ally where they expect only an adversary. The expression thus names both a coalition strategy and a political limit: single-issue solidarity may need to give way to a more difficult alignment across cultural divisions.

Relation to the Book’s Account of Modernity

The proposal sits within the book’s wider account of modern social life. Its analysis of Jacques Lacan’s four discourses distinguishes bureaucratic and biopolitical administration from capitalism’s self-revolutionizing drive to produce and appropriate excess. These are different, incompatible faces of modernity, rather than one reducible to the other. The call to look beyond the Rainbow Coalition follows the same refusal of easy political equivalence: opposing liberal permissiveness is not, by itself, opposition to capitalism, and an apparent cultural enemy may stand against the economic system that liberals also contest.