Surprising look at how John Brown showed that agitation is another name for citizenship

This is something thing you don't see every day, even in 2020 so far: a full-throated defense of John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry and the slave-liberation project it was meant to kick off. It comes at the end of a piece by Richard Kreitner and Rick Perlstein about the long trope of the "outside agitator", A Brief History of Dangerous Others NYBooks 07/27/2020:

Consider American history’s most notorious outside agitator: John Brown. Although his 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, failed to spark a larger revolt of the enslaved, Brown succeeded in accelerating the conflict over slavery and hastening abolition. A Connecticut-born radical and a veteran of “Bleeding Kansas,” that yearslong agitator-palooza, Brown didn’t care about the hackneyed antebellum nostrum — the core of American political culture — that Northerners should leave white Southerners alone, even if that meant allowing the slaver power to survive and expand indefinitely. His Harpers Ferry attack exploded in an instant the nearly century-long, elite-enforced consensus that condemned any criticism of slavery from outside the South as ipso facto illegitimate. Still today sometimes depicted as a treacherous terrorist, Brown was instead arguably America’s quintessential unionist and patriot: he thought Americans in one part of the country were responsible for what went on in every other part, and he acted on that belief without hesitation.

This is how American identity is supposed to work. It rarely does. But in the country we need and deserve—and must today build — the concept of the outside agitator will be nonsensical. The work of agitation, from wherever it comes, is simply another name for citizenship.

Magpie performing Old John Brown by Si Kahn 04/08/2015:

"2020", the Bonus Army in 1932, and asymmetric partisan polarization in the US

We don't know yet whether in 5, 10, years from now classes on Contemporary History with have units on "2020" as an iconic year like "1968". (Hopefully not like "1914"!)

But three historians are giving us a preliminary look in current articles. One is Millsaps College historian Bob McElvaine, who in The Political Price of Military Assaults on Americans Medium 06/17/2020 looks at Herbert Hoover's human and political fiasco with the brutal military suppression of the Bonus Army protest in 1932. He also discussed that and the Great Depression as well in a recent English-language interview with Thomas Seifert from the Austrian Wiener Zeitung, Interview with Prof. Robert McElvaine, Author of "The Great Depression" 06/12/2020:

The German translation of the interview has the title, "'The deepest recession of all time'": "Die tiefste Rezession aller Zeiten" 14.06.2020. In the Medium piece, he writes about the attack on the Bonus Army protesters, commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who is a heroic figure in the rightwing pantheon:

Though MacArthur had acted in direct disobedience of his orders, Hoover chose to take responsibility for what the military leader had done. The President was making a calculated move to the right, to stand in the fall election for law and order. The immediate reaction of major newspapers was generally in favor of the assault. The New York Times referred to the Bonus Army “insurrection.” “We are confident,” the paper’s editors affirmed, “that the decision of the President will be sustained by the great majority of our citizens.”

That confidence was misplaced, as the Democratic nominee understood. “Everyone could see what was there,” Franklin Roosevelt said of the man in the White House, “and they wouldn’t like it.” Hoover, Roosevelt remarked, had “set Doug MacArthur on those harmless vets.” Instead of sending troops and gas, FDR said, Hoover should have sent coffee and donuts. “There was nothing inside the man but jelly,” the challenger said of the incumbent. “Maybe there never had been anything.” [my emphasis]

Sean Wilentz also looks at the Bonus March and its possible relevant for the 2020 Presidential campaign, The Disgrace of Donald Trump Rolling Stone 06/15/2020. He also looks at more recent times, and gives the following description that is a key part of the story of asymmetric partisan polarization in the US. Picking up with the Bush 1 Administration, he writes:

When no conservative in Reagan’s mold successfully claimed his mantle, leadership of the GOP fell to those elements of the traditional party that had accommodated themselves to the Reagan revolution, personified by George H.W. Bush, the Connecticut Yankee reborn as a Texas conservative. Bush well understood that to win the presidency, he would need to claim and then agitate the Reagan base; and as his campaign manager Lee Atwater, steeped in the wiles of South Carolina politics, understood just as well, this meant stirring racist fears, an evil art at which Atwater excelled. When, as president, Bush ran afoul of supply-side dogma, old faces like the reactionary Pat Buchanan and new faces like the firebrand Georgian Newt Gingrich challenged his leadership of the party.

From that point forward, a radicalizing dynamic overtook Republican national politics. Constituencies that the traditional GOP had tried to absorb to build its post-1960s majority - conservative white Southerners, including, more broadly, white evangelical Christians - became the party’s heart and soul. Establishment Republican leaders vying for the presidency — Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney - had to appease an ever-hardening right-wing base, centered in what has become the solidly Republican white South. When those leaders lost - as they did twice to Bill Clinton and twice to Barack Obama - the base despaired of anything resembling conventional conservative politics. The one GOP victor, George W. Bush, did win over the party base, thanks in part to his Svengali, Karl Rove, and in part to the patriotic surge that followed the attacks of 9/11. But Bush disastrously invaded Iraq, and he ended his presidency with the start of the Great Recession and the birth of the radical Tea Party, which went on to hound President Obama at every turn. [my emphasis]

And that "radicalizing dynamic" is still running wild in the Republican Party, the sideshow of the NeverTrump Republicans notwithstanding.

And Rick Perlstein reflects on the current consequences of four decades of Reagan-Thatcher economic and cultural dogma, aka, neoliberalism, although he doesn't use the term here: Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us In These Times 06/17/2020. He writes:

Covid-19 has sucked the world into a vortex of interlocking crises that demand collective sacrifice to resolve. The world’s most powerful nation has revealed itself as tragically unequal to the challenge - unwilling to transcend private interest. From the deranged Republicans running the White House and the Senate to the penny-pinching Democrats running the House of Representatives, from ordinary folks who can’t be bothered to wear a mask to corporate titans scouring the horizon for profit-taking opportunities - it all marks the distillation of a national ideology: selfishness, über alles.

He also reminds us how bipartisan this push was:

President Carter ... declared, in his 1978 State of the Union, "Government cannot solve our problems, it can't set our goals, it cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy." Two years later, Carter ran for reelection against Reagan by holding himself up as Reagan's deregulationist equal: The party of FDR now believed, "We ought to get the government's nose out of the private enterprise of this country. We've deregulated rail, deregulated trucking, deregulated airlines, deregulated financial institutions, working on communications, to make sure that we have a free enterprise system that's competitive." [Carter]

That larger project, of writing public obligation out of business's social contract with the people, was bipartisan. "Business is entitled to its decade, and I will try to help them get it," the Democratic chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski, told a business association in 1981. By 2020, the surrender to market logic had advanced so far along that when the moral equivalent of war came, America's arsenal to fight it proved quite nearly bare[.] (my emphasis)

That represents the other side of the asymmetric partisan polarization. The Republican Party has spent four decades in the throes of Wilentz' "radicalizing dynamic." He suggests in the article is better dated to 1992, but his description of Old Man Bush's more moderate course running up against the Reaganized Congressional party is accurate.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have mostly been dominated for the last four decades by a tendency of what I'll call radical centrism, because that sound politer than the alternatives that come to mind. There has been durable opposition to the course of those decades, represented in Presidential politics by the campaigns of Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, Jerry Brown in 1992, and Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. Ted Kennedy mounted a substantial primary challenge to Carter in 1980, attempting to keep the party more on the New Deal/Great Society track. Including, yes, national health insurance.

I don't want to get too caught up into the Presidential-level references. But Obama's 2008 campaign was generally perceived as a progressive work, particularly compared to his establishment Dem rival Hillary Clinton. But in his policy priorities, he quickly proved to be on board with the chronic centrism. And is still there in 2020, when he helped in the emergency operation to consolidate the donors quickly around Joe Biden. Biden's record, if it can be fairly called centrist at all, is a centrism titled toward the conservative side.

Donor influence and the steady increase of massive amounts of money in politics, particularly since Citizens United decision in 2010, has been the most important influence in this asymmetric polarization process. But some of it is also due to the duck-and-cover style the Democrats have developed, in which they embrace Republican framing of issues and a general duck-and-cover impulse they can't shake:

A final thought on Carter's deregulation policy in 1976-80. On the whole, it was clearly a bad general direction. But the Democrats' position on deregulation at that time was not simply surrender to business lobbies. It was also one of the response to the inflation that seemed to be intractable, the idea being that establishing more price competition could restrain inflationary pressures. Even figures clearly identified at the time as being on the pro-labor left of the party, including Ted Kennedy and Fred Harris, also adopted some form of this approach.

Jimmy Carter is also a special case, because after his Presidency, he has become a figure possibly more respected for his stances, which at times look radical in comparison to those of timid duck-and-cover Democrats. For instance, his book Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (2005) was a more searing indictment of the Cheney-Bush Administration that established Democrats in Congress could muster. He has said publicly that he voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016, although in 2020 he expressed concern that both Biden and Sanders were too old to start a Presidency.

Biden and the risk of a no-mandate Presidency

I'm fine with the concept of a united front between conservatives and the left against fascism, Orbanism, or other forms of authortiarianism.

In theory. But politics doesn't happen only in theory. And in the current American political reality, we have two political parties who in some important sense have collapsed. The Republicans are now the Bunker Boy party. Trump is driving the position and tone of the party, and he's generally incompetent at government and knows only demagoguery as a political strategy. And he's a serious authoritarian. Robert Reich puts it this way:

Trump is a fascist. https://t.co/E77DID8hiB

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) June 7, 2020

But the political scene is defined by asymmetric partisan polarization. Joe Biden, now all but formally the Democratic Presidential candidate, is a conservative Democrat. And he's pursuing what may be the only kind of campaign he's capable of mounting, which is to continually define himself as Not Trump.

But in a country that has been through two weeks of a genuine popular uprising against white racism and militarized policing, this is man who is leading the Democratic Party. Joe Biden Warns Of "Predators On Our Streets" Who Were "Beyond The Pale" In 1993 Crime Speech America Rising PAC 06/18/2020:

Yes, that was 27 years ago. And Biden has enough sense to try to strike a different tone in today's political environment. We have to hope he does! Because trying to out-Republican the Republicans, or trying to sound moew authoritarian than the authoritarians, which is exactly what Biden was doing there, is not only a losing strategy for 2020. It also would leave the new Democratic President with no mandate but a Republican-but-not-Donald-Trump one.

It will be interesting to see if the Republicans and/or other pro-Trump groups will try to use this videa to depress Democratic turnout in some areas. Because this whole segment drips with racialized fear-mongering. He didn't need to be specific about the race of the incorrigible evildoers he was talking about her. This was a period in which violent crime really had peaked. But the political context was heavily racialized by blaming crime on dishonest and demagogic images of degenerate, conscience-less black young men - who came to be labelled by a pseudo-scentific label of "superpredators". So when Biden says in that clip after 2:50, those scary monsters need to be "in jail. Away from my mother. Your husband. Our families," he didn't need to hold up cartoon from a Citizen Council magazine to show people who he was talking about.

A sad contemporary documentation of this assumption around that time came from Thomas Edsall with Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (1991). Allegedly taking a liberal perspective, Edsall argued that whichever party was seen as the most anti-black party would dominate American politics for the foreseeable future. The 1992 Presidential victory of Bill Clinton provided convicing evidence against that argument. But Joe Biden, working with the Clinton Admnistration, was still on that bandwagon.

The attractiveness of that position for the Democrats of that day was in no small measure a function of the fact that California at the was considered a safe Republican state in Presidential elections, and therefore Democrats needed to win votes from conservative Southern whites in national elections. Clinton and Gore actually carried California in 1992. And California Gov. Pete Wilson permanently tarnished his own reputation and made California a safe Democratic state by his successful passage of Proposition 187 in 1994. The law itself was overturned by the courts as unconstitutional. And it boosted Latino voting rates in California and shifted Latino voting preferences significantly more to the Democratic side.

So even the supposedly hardheaded, pragmatic calculation driving that brand of Democratic politics in the early 1990s was highly questionable.

And yet, here we are in 2020, with the Democratic Party still trying to sound as bland and accomodating as possible to Republcian positions. Of course, the Democrats still have a long list of policy positions they recite that makes the eyes of even the staunchest Democratic partisans glaze over after a few seconds. But the define their themes and images around a bland moderation rather than developing themes that build support for Democratic reforms.

For instance, Barack Obama did a "virtual town hall" last week. (Obama holds virtual town hall on policing and civil unrest PBS Newshour 06/03/2020) He was clear and comforting and thinks things have mostly gotten better over the last ten years on the white racism front. And talks about task forces. [Deep sigh!]

I've missed the protest signs saying, "We Demand a Task Force!" That's like a throwback to those long-ago days of, oh, a month ago when people were scandalized at talk about a "revolution" in the form of, well, national health insurance and higher voter participation.

The 1 1/3 hour-long event also features legendary freedom fighter and Wall Street lawyer Eric Holder. Who was Better Than Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions. He quotes Richard Pryor saying that "you don't see many old fools". Does this guy not talk to anyone over 35? Did he pay any attention at all to the age patterns among white people who voted for Bunker Boy in 2016?

It also features Phillipe Cunningham, who sits on the Minneapolis City Council and who according to his Wikipedia profile "identifies as black, queer, and transgender." He gives a (to me) strangely chipper pitch about all the constructive things they've been doing to reduce police violence in, uh, Minneapolis. That same city council just passed what sounds like a bold "abolitionist" reform of their police forces. But after Minneapolis cops touched off a nationwide peaceful revolt by murdered George Floyd, I'm not sure how much they have to bring in the way of successful police reform ideas at theis moment.

The Democrats do seem to be using Obama as a major surrogate for Biden. Which is smart politics.

But we still need to be concerned about what a government can accomplish whose only political mandate is We're Not Trump. Rick Perlstein has this take on the moment (Michawel Finnegan, Biden vows police reform after sealing Democratic nomination to challenge Trump Los Angeles Times ):

Historian Rick Perlstein described Biden, a U.S. senator for 36 years, as a “bellwether politician” who — like Johnson before he ascended to the presidency after John F. Kennedy’s assassination — is not easily seen as a leader of major structural change in American society.

But the “interlocking catastrophes” of COVID-19, a historic surge in unemployment and now racial upheaval could well force Biden, should he unseat Trump, to rise to the occasion and pass laws as sweeping as the New Deal adopted under President Franklin D. Roosevelt to overcome the Depression, he said.

“The kind of sink-or-swim ideology of America is not going to cut it,” said Perlstein, author of “Nixonland,” a book on the social turbulence of the 1960s and ‘70s in the United States. “So it is in a lot of ways a New Deal moment, and it really demands a president who’s willing and able to build a coalition for structural change, or else we’re going to face all kinds of catastrophes like the ones we’re going through now.”

Rick Perlstein, impeachment, and invoking ideals of the past

This is an informed commentary from historian Rick Perlstein, who specializes in the history of the conservative movement in the US, Rick Perlstein on the History Behind the Impeachment Inquiry Amanpour and Company 11/15/2019:

This is a notable excerpt:

... one of the things that Nancy Pelosi who's done some great things over the years and I respect her a heck of a lot has said is that she, when she was talking about how, you know, maybe Trump would just impeach himself and we didn't want to push this thing, the only way she wanted to pursue an impeachment inquiry is that they could somehow convince Republicans with the weight of the facts, because otherwise it would be too divisive.

Well, you know, the civil rights movement was divisive.

The suffrage movement was divisive.

Justice is divisive.

You know why it's divisive?

People who don't want justice are going to make us think and I think we're in one of the exitential movements for the nation where we're facing a choice.

Either we get own to brass tacks and fight for the values that the nation was founded on or we worry about divisiveness. [my emphasis]

Rick's reference to "the values that the nation was founded on" especially caught my attention, because he's using the very flawed past to point to shared aspirational ideals that can and should be applied to the very flawed present.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was great at doing that, on polemical, political, religious, and philosophical levels. Franklin Rossevelt's famous 1936 "Rendezvous with Destiny" speech is a classic example of invoking the struggles, aspirations, and accomplishments of the past to create a left-populist political framework. I'm continuously frustrated to see how difficult it seems to be the left and center-left to do that today, despite excellent models like MLK and FDR.

Since conservatism tends to look to restoring the past or preserving existing conditions, or at least to "make haste slowly" toward progress, it may be inevitable that the right will be more comfortable praising an idealized past than the left. But that doesn't mean people on the left have to just give up on the effort!

Why are the Democrats so quick to duck-and-cover on controversies?

Steve Benen (@stevebenen) on Twitter called attention to a brief post by Josh Marshall from a decade ago, Wired TPM 02/19/2019, explaining why he had bee saying that Washington DC was "wired for Republicans":

We’re coming off of, or at least we’ve had a period of (because who knows about the future) thirty plus years of conservative dominance of Washington. By some measures you could say forty years. But at least thirty, notwithstanding Bill Clinton’s eight years in office. That conditions a generation of people with mindsets based around Republicans being the party of power, the party whose ideas get vindicated at the polls. Most of all Washington is a city that coddles up to and worships power. But a generation of one party holding the reins selects for certain kinds of journalists in key positions of power, the policy experts at the think tanks who get the journalists calls, the lobbyists who move the most money and so forth. You build up a set of assumptions about what kinds of people and ideas are respectable and which aren’t. Which are old-fashioned, which are ‘cutting edge’ and so forth. Who defines conventional wisdom?

In all of these respects, DC remains overwhelmingly wired for the GOP. [my emphasis]

Unfortunately, there has been a real assymetry in how the two major parties have approached framing the issues. The Republicans aggressively frame issues in a very conservative way, and in too many instances a hardcore rightwing way. Their segregationist voter-suppression program is a key example of the latter.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have largely accepted the conservative framing while trying to present a friedlier face than GOP radicals. This is something that linguist George Lakoff has emphasized for years. Here is a piece he co-authored with Gil Duran, Trump has turned words into weapons. And he's winning the linguistic war Guardian 06/13/2018:

Trump knows the press has a strong instinct to repeat his most outrageous claims, and this allows him put the press to work as a marketing agency for his ideas. His lies reach millions of people through constant repetition in the press and social media. This poses an existential threat to democracy.

Language works by activating brain structures called “frame-circuits” used to understand experience. They get stronger when we hear the activating language. Enough repetition can make them permanent, changing how we view the world.

Even negating a frame-circuit activates and strengthens it, as when Nixon said “I am not a crook” and people thought of him as a crook.

Scientists, marketers, advertisers and salespeople understand these principles. So do Russian and Islamic State hackers. But most reporters and editors clearly don’t. So the press is at a disadvantage when dealing with a super salesman with an instinctive ability to manipulate thought by 1) framing first 2) repeating often, and 3) leading others to repeat his words by getting people to attack him within his own frame.

I have my reservations about the part of Lakoff's argument that stresses the idea that disputing false claims serves to reinforce the false claim. There's an important point there. But facts do matter! Nixon was a crook. For journalists, it's part of their job to verify or debunk claims, including ones that are current political narratives from partisans. Scientists have a similar obligation in their fields, although they have an advantage in that their specialized journals and forums don't have the same kind of general audiences as news services.

Politicians face a different kind of challenge debunking false claims, not least because their messaging inevitably requires a great deal of generalization and simplification to fit into 30-second TV ads or to compete for a short space for a quote in newspapers or news reports. But it is possible. Bernie Sanders, in fact, did a good job of it just this week in his "town hall" appearance on FOX News. (Holly Otterbein, Sanders takes on Fox - and emerges triumphant Politico 04/15/2019)

But the Democrats as a group really do have a serious framing problem. It's not all about slogans and spin. But framing really does matter a lot. Historian Rick Perlstein in an interview with Isaac Chotiner, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Takes the Democrats Back to the Future New Yorker 01/10/2019 talks about the Democrats' often weird habit of ducking-and-covering in the fact of Republican attacks. Some of it is no doubt related to the desire of Democrats to please big donors who aren't especially enthusiastic about the kind of programs the Democratic base like.

The recent public bickering between the Sanders camp and the Clintonian establishment-Democratic thinktank Center for American Progress headed by Neera Tanden has provided some public reminders of the kinds of contributions that can be at stake (Elizabeth Williamson and Kenneth Vogel, The Rematch: Bernie Sanders vs. a Clinton Loyalist New York Times 04/15/2019):

Money to the Center for American Progress from the personal foundation of the Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg surged to $665,000 in 2018 from $15,000 in 2017, while Facebook fended off scrutiny for mishandling users’ personal data, fueling violence and providing a platform for Russian election interference.

Last year, the center got $1 million from the family foundation of Jonathan Lavine, a managing partner at Bain Capital, and at least $1 million from the tech industry’s Silicon Valley Community Foundation. It also received $225,000 from the private foundation of a Walmart heir, Sam Walton.

Contributions can be structured in such a way to maintain general independence for a thinktank. But thinktanks are also often structured as advocacy institutions in some way, not as independent academic institutions.

But Perstein is also correct that there looks to be some kind of strange psychological factors at work in the Democrats' ingrained habit of accepting Republican framing. The party, he says, "almost forty years later, is still traumatized by the success of Ronald Reagan. It’s a profoundly generational phenomenon, and, clearly, it’s scary."

He gives this example of how the Democratic "trauma" and duck-and-cover instinct played out during the Cheney-Bush Administration:

O.K., but you didn’t really answer my question earlier about whether the Democratic Party is unhealthy. This party just won a huge national victory, I think it’s won six of the past seven popular votes for the Presidency, et cetera.

Right, so what do you do with that political capital? That’s the trauma - they don’t even see political capital. They still see the Democrats in a situation of political deficit.

So liberalism and the Democratic Party have always been O.K., but, because they’re so traumatized, and because of the rise of the right, they haven’t been willing to rhetorically, and in terms of actual policies, push forward enough and get enough done?

Well, look at the Democrats at a time like 2004. George Bush has started this disastrous war, he’s beginning to approach going underwater in his popularity, and yet he wins reëlection. His campaign strategy was to try to get voters saying, “Well, I don’t really agree with what he is saying, but he really seems to believe in what he is saying.” And he ran against a candidate, John Kerry, God bless him, who literally formed his political identity as this brave, truth-telling veteran who talked about the immorality of the Vietnam War. And Kerry ran an entire Presidential campaign in which he did not say one word about the thing that had defined him. And then ran a party convention in which no one was allowed to criticize George Bush by name. So of course they voted for the authentic candidate. [my emphasis in italics]

Robert Cruickshank gives a brief sketch of what Perlstein calls the Democratic trauma in a Twitter thread.

Dem establishment still misreads 1972 & 1984 elections in order to silence the party's left. It is hard to see how any Democrat, regardless of ideology, could have defeated two popular presidents riding strong economic booms (which were crafted to ensure their re-election).

— Robert Cruickshank (@cruickshank) April 16, 2019

1980 looks like a landslide on the electoral map but many states were close, Reagan only got 50.5% of pop vote, and voters broke for Reagan only in final two weeks. It was a close election. So was 2000. So was 2016.

— Robert Cruickshank (@cruickshank) April 16, 2019

Perstein illustrates the current duck-and-cover Democratic reaction, one that recalls the famous Robert Frost quote, "A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."

The Democratic Party doesn’t even know how to take yes for an answer. They can’t even accept the idea that they are a majority party. There’s this great line, “He who seems most kingly is the king.” Unless you act like a leader, people aren’t going to treat you like a leader.

Take [Democratic Congresswoman Rashida] Tlaib using a swear word. Truman got in trouble for saying “If you vote for Nixon, you ought to go to hell.” And that was a brassy sort of rhetoric people had come to expect from Democrats. Not this pearl-clutching response that, every time someone uses strong language, they have to apologize for it. [my emphasis]