Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 19: The social function of white racism

I've fallen behind in my April posts against Confederate "Heritage" Month. I'm intending to complete a daily series for April. But some of the posts will spill over into May.

For this post, I'm going back to Stetson Kennedy's 1946 book Southern Exposure that criticizes the Jim Crown laws and voter suppression practices directed against African-Americans at the time, particularly in the South.

In the book, Kennedy speculates on the mass psychology of white racism. He starts it with an assumption that early human tribes were suspicious and hostile to each other. That's still a widespread assumption, though I'm not sure how well current anthropological research sustains it:

Primitive men no sooner became aware of their racial and cultural divergencies than they began to band together in tribes of their own kind - and individual xenophobias merged into group xenophobias. As such, they acquired the characteristics of mass psychology. The individual's fear of strange tribesmen was re-enforced by the identical fears of all his fellow tribesmen; and the trepidation which had begun as a protective instinct now took on the infallibility of a verity imputed by socially consistent sensation.

But Kennedy also makes it clear that this is in no way a valid excuse for contemporary racist practices, i.e., that's just the way people are. He's not buying that:

Although it is entirely natural for people to first make issues of their differences, it is equally natural for them to resolve those differences and to work out ways of co-operation. This means that race hatred can be kept alive only by forces foreign to the folk themselves. The whole monstrous mass of racial and religious animosities, despite their instinctive and traditional background, are not bona fide folkways, but a deadly virus that has been artificially cultivated by the few who profit from the disunity of the many. Exploitation, imperialism, fascism, and war would all be impossible without forced feeding of these asocial instincts. [my emphasis]

He also characterizes that process this way: "Fascism represents the ultimate expression of this policy."

And that is still the direction that contemporary versions of voter suppression and election subversion aimed at displacing African-American and Latino voters are headed.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 9: the white racist historical narrative behind the infamous Dred Scott decision

One notable aspect of Chief Justice Roger Taney is that he incorporated broad, ideological historical arguments about slavery and race.

David Thomas Konig discusses that outlook in an essay called "Constitutional Law and the Legitimation of History" in The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law (2010):

Taney’s opinion, however, did more than call on history to solidify slavery by showing it to be embedded in the American past, essential to its origins, justified by its religion, and inseparable from its present commitment to liberty. Those arguments had been made for decades, and by the 1850s there existed a widespread and deeply entrenched Southern tradition of using history to show the universality of slavery as a system and the suitability of Africans for it. Proslavery apologists, that is, already had constructed an “inescapable past” for American slavery and had used “history as moral and political instruction” to describe slavery as normal and racism natural.

Such a proslavery historical narrative brought the institution to the center of the national narrative and justified it against the rising din of antislavery argument, but it did not fully answer a new challenge emerging as Dred and Harriet Scott’s petition for freedom, commenced in the 1840s, moved slowly through the next decade. If history was to continue to provide the narrative basis for a jurisprudence of slavery and racial control, it had to address more than slavery and slaves: it had to respond to the historical reality of free African Americans whose past belied the conventional narrative, and whose vocal assertion of that fact contradicted the very foundations of proslavery jurisprudence. Taney had ample support for his version of the history of slavery; he had to create it for his version of free African Americans. [my emphasis]

In other words, the racial argument - which we could call Social Darwinism in hindsight (Darwin's On the Origin of Species wouldn't be published until 1859, and we can't blame Darwin himself for "Social Darwinism") - used to justify slavery also had the effect of excluding all Black people from equal humanity and basic rights. Taney and his Court raised this odious argument to the status of binding Constitutional law in the Dred Scott decision.

Konig goes on to remind his readers that the proslavery narrative was not only one that developed and hardened over time. It was also a contested narrative, although pitifully few leading American political figures were willing to challenge the notion of Black inferiority:

Taney’s opinion, to be sure, expressed the widespread and prevailing historical understanding among whites of the debased and excluded position of African Americans in the nation’s history. But it is vital for subsequent generations to be aware that such a view, however widely held in the nineteenth century, was nonetheless only one interpretation of that past available at the time, one that by the 1850s was coming under repeated attack as orthodoxy.

What does the current Republicans' preferred view of American history look like?

While doing some reorganizing of my digital stuff, I happened across this article from 1959 which is available online that has a lot of relevance to the current McCarthyist/moral panic/hysteria, or whatever we want to call it, over having public schools teaching the supposedly terrifying “critical race theory” or books referencing the fact that the Holocaust once took place. (Bernard Weisberger, The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography Journal of Southern History 25:4, Nov 1959)

Even in 1959, the dominant professional historical view of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period in the South was, to put it gently, heavily influenced by the Lost Cause view of American history. That is, it was dishonest and based on a white supremacist view of the world.

Now, I know that the current hysteria is mostly aimed at driving every competent teacher out of public schools and generally cripple if not destroy the public schools. But we do have a good idea of what the kind of history is like that Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott would be adequate to protect innocent students from ever learning that there was ever a mean or violent or racist white person in the US since 1776.

Because a view much like that was actually predominant even in academic history from the late 19th century until well into the 1960s. And that is what Bernard Weisberger addresses in this piece from six decades ago.

[African-Americans are] known to us [historians] almost exclusively through the writings of white men, who, whether well-intentioned or not, were interested parties to a conflict. Conflicts may be solved peaceably, but not wished away. The conflict between white Southerners' determination to be the architects of their own society and black Southerners' desire for a place of dignity in that society did not disappear in 1877. It was "solved" by Northern acquiescence in the subordination of the Southern Negro. Paul Buck's well-known "road to reunion" was paved with the broken ambitions of the freedmen. If Reconstruction is to be correctly branded as a failure, it is just to point out that its aftermath also represented a great failure of democracy. But American historians do not, to judge by their works, like the word "failure" any better than the word "conflict." Neither fits the textbook myths of underlying unity, of unceasing progress, of all problems ultimately coming out right, somehow, in the pendulum swings of time. In the case of the knotty race problem, however, only a hardheaded approach to distasteful truths will yield real understanding. [my emphasis]

Understanding the purpose of the agitation against "critical race theory"

Randall Kennedy takes on the Republican/far-right conspiracy theory around "critical race theory" in The Right-Wing Attack on Racial Justice Talk The American Prospect 09/28/2021.

The right has set up critical race theory (CRT for short= as "a target useful to its aims, which include taking the country back to an earlier era of accepted white hegemony."

As Kennedy explains, the rightwingers use "critical race theory" as a bogeyman. My own translation of the Republicans' message with the phrase would be, "Scary Jews! Scary black people!" The agitation focuses on promoting anti-black racism, but the conspiracy narrative behind it incorporates the far-right anti-Semitic "cultural Marxism" trope which blames Political Correctness and CRT on conniving Jewish Marxists.

After briefly sketching the actual acadrmic theory that did adopt the label "critical race theory" and related developments in actual academic fields, he explains:

In the far-right commentariat, “critical race theory” has become a catchall phrase that refers not so much to a discrete body of thought as a bogeyman onto which those who invoke it negatively can cast fears, resentments, and prejudices. Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute admitted as much when he declared that “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” He remarked similarly that “We have successfully frozen their brand — “critical race theory” — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” According to Rufo, “critical race theory is the perfect villain.” He ought to know: The “critical race theory” that he attacks incessantly is, in large part, a figment of his creation. [my emphasis]

He also reminds us that rightwing agitation against decent textbooks and educational practices is not some new with the hysteria against CRT: "The history of American education at every level is full of examples of textbooks blocked, library books pulled, and instructors fired on account of right-wing objections to teachings about racial injustice."

Kennedy does stress the need to recognize the propaganda goal of the anti-CRT narrative. So treating it as a good faith effort to improve educational practices is not likely to move its advocates. "It is, for the most part, a race-baiting ruse to gin up the Trumpian base, to vent the status anxieties of aggrieved whites, and to bait progressives into saying and doing things that alienate potential allies."

Michael Gerson's surprising observation on systemic racism in the US

Michael Gerson can be an annoying self-righteous conservative. But his op-ed I’m a conservative who believes systemic racism is real (Washington Post 06/21/2021) is actually decent. No bold new insights. But decent in a way that at least a few Republican conservatives may find accessible.

I mean, it's Michael Gerson, so he takes a dumb shot at Tom Paine (?!) in the piece.

But it is (mostly) a decent piece:

I don’t think it’s possible to be a conservative without believing that racism is, in part, structural.

Most on the American right have dug into a very different position. They tend to view racism as an individual act of immorality. And they regard the progressive imputation of racism to be an attack on their character. In a free society, they reason, the responsibility for success and failure is largely personal. They’re proud of the productive life choices they’ve made and refuse to feel guilty for self-destructive life choices made by others. It’s an argument that sounds convincing — until it’s tested against the experience of our own lives. [my emphasis]

This is a core posture of conservatives, and is also part of the neoliberal worldview that gained dominance in the US in the 1980s. Here's Maggie Thatcher's classic description of the neoliberal outlook (Margaret Thatcher: a life in quotes Guardian 04/08/2013):

They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours. (1987) [my emphasis]

Ivan Natividad gives some more background and additional references (How American racism is rooted in residential segregation Berkeley News 06/21/2021): He quotes Stephen Menendian, director of a UC-Berkeley institute that focuses on such issues:

While 20th century segregation was also residential — Black urban areas versus white suburban areas — in the 21st century we’re seeing segregation as more regional today. We’re also seeing white suburbs and Black suburbs.

A city like Ferguson, Missouri, in 1970 was 90% white. But by 2010, it’s 66% Black. Segregation now is more mobile and more regional than it was in the 20th century. It’s much more multiracial. It’s not binary. And it’s about the community you live in, not the neighborhood within the city you live in.

What hasn’t changed is that these segregated communities of color are still poorly resourced. White communities have these high pockets of private wealth and resources, while non-white areas have very anemic low levels of wealth where residents are extremely underpaid, under-resourced, and have disinvested public goods and infrastructure. ...

When you think about disproportional use of police brutality, or COVID-19 health outcomes and unemployment in communities of color, society often labels these disparities as racism in these individual institutions. But all these outcomes are really connected to residential segregation. This is what makes it systemic and not institutional racism. [my emphasis]

Left critical perspectives on superficial forms of wokeness/cancel culture/political correctness

A friend of mine recently called my attention to this video from a YouTube podcast series called Carefree Wandering by Hans-Georg Moeller, Wokeism 06/09/2021.

It deals with various issues currently in discussion around "wokeism," the most recent label for what conservatives derided for decades as "political correctness." "Cancel culture" is a relative concept. Which mainly refers to efforts of people trying to be less racist and sexist and to criticize conditions and practices promoted racism and sexism.

It's an interesting survey of the issues connected to what we're calling "wokeism" these days. On the one hand, any left politics that carries on any part of the socialist or New Deal traditions would have to pay attention to class dynamics as a central issue. And I'm still part of the team that thinks the arc of the universe bends toward One Big Union by-and-by. So, if I were going to make an argument about what's True Left, I would insist on a hardcore pro-labor element.

Like pretty much every concept in politics practiced by mortals, concepts can used, abused, instrumentalized, altered, and condemned for a variety of purposes ranging from high principle to ultra-prgramatic and/or corrupt politics of a given moment. But since all practical politics requires some kind of prioritization and tactical calculation, finding the best balance of issues and approaches to support the labor movement, fighting against racial and gender discrimination, and other left and left-center concerns like combatting climate change, opposition war and nuclear weapons proliferation, and defending democracy and human rights.

He also takes on the arguments of pop philosopher Jordan Peterson and some of his nonsense about postmodernism and left "political correctness." The talk includes an interesting an informative discussion of the memory of the Holocaust in German politics, although I would describe what he calls German "guilt-pride" in a different way.

Here's a commentary from 2020 by the late Michael Brooks, The Problem With “White Fragility” (TMBS 146) 07/05/2020, dealing with a case he persuasively portrays as a "woke" business trend that actually does disconnect anti-discrimination politics from a particular subjective brand of "wokeness." Sadly, less than three weeks after he made this video, he died suddenly of a previously undiagnosed medical condition. Broadly speaking, it focuses on the way "wokeness" relates to politics as current practiced by the European and American left.

He makes reference to Cedrick-Michael Simmons' article, I'm Black and Afraid of 'White fragility' The Bellows 06/22/2021

This is another podcast on Wokeism and the left hosted by Ana Kasparian, who started and co-hosted this particular show before his untimely death, Wokeness Is Hurting Democrats 05/02/2021:

Here's a third podcast, this one about the versions of the discussion going on in Germany and Austria, put on by an Austrian social-democratic organization. The label more often used there is "identity politics," which of course is also used in the US and other countries, as well. Die Selbstgerechten und die linke Identitätspolitik BSABund 06/10/2021:

Kaveh Yazdani covers the German discussion in The poverty of mainstream universalism and exclusive identity politics Open Democracy 03/23/2021.

In the American context, the history of self-identified Black Nationalists like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael and groups supporting types of minority ethnic nationalism is important background. That trend stressed that it was the responsibility of whites who wanted to support black civil rights to concentrate on changing the perceptions and actions of white people.

Even in contexts of multiracial civil rights groups and labor unions, it was considered very important that whites needed to recognize the reality of white racism and how it functioned. And fighting for civil rights has always involved confronting a very real white power structure. And part of the functioning of that white power structure, which broadly means the same as the common phrase "structural racism" today, has always been to persuade whites who are otherwise disadvantaged by existing conditions that siding with the ruling elites on the basis that the existing structures allowing them to not only feel superior to non-whites, but provided at least some kind of material advantage (white privilege).

One among many examples of this are the slave patrols in pre-Civil War times that used nonslaveowning whites to patrol for black people who might be escaped slaves, and in practice gave poor whites the opportunity to play "master" by arbitrarily abusing random African-Americans under cover of state authority. Another would be mine owners who employed only white workers but used African-Americans as strikebreakers during labor conflicts.

So it is important for activists on the left or anywhere else on the political spectrum to remember that even the most conscientious whites may have an unfortunate tendency to be convinced that downplaying the urgency of civil rights issues in order to spare the tender feelings of other whites. Racial and gender discrimination is very often intimately connected with class and economic conditions. But the notion that an economic "rising tide lifts all boats" will solve discrimination problems is false. Affluent African-Americans, for instance, are far more at risk of being arbitrarily executed by police on a traffic stop than whites of the same economic status.

That doesn't eliminate the inevitable prioritizations and tactical calculations of politics. But discrimination and institutional racism and sexism won't go away without opponents combatting them directly. And, yes, part of that means directly confronting whites with the reality of those problems. That doesn't means that politicians and activists have to be stupid or mean about it. But, yes, the only way to avoid pissing off any white people is not to oppose racist policies and practices.

The Republicans obsession over "critical race theory"

"Critical race theory" (CRT) is the faddish new Republican phrase for, "Scary black people! Scary black people!"

Florida just passed a law banning its teaching, without much effort to define what it is. Because, as Julia Craven explains in What Florida’s “Critical Race Theory” Ban Tells Us About Anti-Antiracism Slate 06/11/2021:

As the Florida law demonstrates, the goal of the anti-CRT effort is put the analysis of ongoing racism out of bounds—to treat any inquiry into the material inequities that define the color line in America as something equivalent to Holocaust denial, and to reframe discussion of ongoing injustice as an insult to “white persons.” Other campaigners go as far to equate CRT with Marxism, as if a true accounting of racism in America were somehow going to upend capitalism. Such intentional misreadings allow conservatives to create a dichotomy where considering how racism shaped the country is unpatriotic and anti-American.

There actually is a particular kind of academic analysis that constitutes critical race theory in the academic world. It's essentially a small but important sliver of Constitutional law. David Theo Goldberg gives us a capsule guide to the academic function of critical race theory (The War on Critical Race Theory Boston Review 05/07/2021):

Among CRT’s critics little distinction is drawn, in particular, between the academic disciplines of critical race theory and critical race studies. Critical race theory refers to a body of legal scholarship developed in the 1970s and ’80s, largely out of Harvard Law School, by the likes of Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda, and Charles Lawrence, III, among others. Though varied in their views, what unites the work of these scholars is a shared sense of the importance of attending explicitly to race in legal argument, given the perpetuation of racial and other hierarchies through the structure of colorblind law instituted after the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The framework has since been taken up, expanded, and applied more generally to social discourse and practice. As a jurisprudential and social theory it is open to critique and revision, even rejection with compelling counterargument — all notably absent from the current attacks. [my emphasis in bold]

Then there is the more vague category, "Critical race studies, by contrast, encompass a broader, more loosely affiliated array of academic work. Some far more compelling than others, these accounts have been taken up, debated, and indeed sometimes dismissed in the expansive analysis of race and racism in and beyond the academy today."

But - to state the obvious - Republicans are not concerned that innocent white high school students will find their delicate minds overwhelmed by the subtleties of the postcolonial theorizing of Achille Mbembe. As Goldberg sums it up, "The exact targets of CRT’s critics vary wildly, but it is obvious that most critics simply do not know what they are talking about."

Nor do most of them care.

This is related to the endless conservative whining about "political correctness" and "wokeism", including the crackpot far-right construction, "cultural Marxism." David Neiwert has been following the development of that notion, very influential among the Jews-will-not-replace-us far right internationally: How the 'cultural Marxism' hoax began, and why it's spreading into the mainstream Daily Kos 01/23/2016. See also: Paul Rosenberg, A user's guide to "Cultural Marxism": Anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, reloaded Salon 05/09/2019.

My favorite stereotypically stodgy source, Britannica Online, also has an entry on critical race theory 04/02/2021.

But it's a longtime conservative schtick to pluck some academic concept to offer up for ridicule of the Real (White) Amurcans. So it's important not to confuse the ideological use of such concepts as political polemics to the actual field of thought whose label they have borrowed.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 21: White surpemacists say, oh, white racism? That's all in the past!

The white supremacist 1776 Report provided a narrative framework for contemporary Trumpistas and white supremacists. Here is its template for the present to say that white racism is a thing of the past:

It would take a national movement composed of people from different races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions to bring about an America fully committed to ending legal discrimination.

The Civil Rights Movement culminated in the 1960s with the passage of three major legislative reforms affecting segregation, voting, and housing rights. It presented itself, and was understood by the American people, as consistent with the principles of the founding. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his “I Have a Dream” speech. “This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

It seemed, finally, that America’s nearly two-century effort to realize fully the principles of the Declaration had reached a culmination. But the heady spirit of the original Civil Rights Movement, whose leaders forcefully quoted the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the rhetoric of the founders and of Lincoln, proved to be short-lived.

The Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. [my emphasis]

The key ideological claims involved there include:

• The US since the 1960s has been "fully committed to ending legal discrimination".
• The legal part is key; private discrimination is not a legitimate concern for government remedy.
• Actual racial discrimination even in areas like government employment is okay as long as it's not explicitly legally mandated.
• Legislation in the 1960s against formal legal segregation, voting rights, and housing means that all legitimate concerns about racism and racial discrimination ended sometime around 1970.
• Those goals of the civil rights movement were presented by that movement as consistent with major aspects of the American political tradition and were "understood" as such by the public.
• After that magic turning point, the demands of that "Civil Rights Movement" switched radically to things that opposed to the American tradition and so are today thoroughly un-American.

As important as it is to understand some of the details of how propaganda works, debunking even shabby pseudohistory like this risks suggesting to some people that it's more serious that it is. This is only serious in its malignant intent. (In an earlier post, I talked some about the "highbrow" arguments of the "West Coast Straussians" provide a background for The 1776 Report.)

How that gets translated into typical Republican language is well illustrated by this clip of Brit Hume at FOX News. (Brit Hume on Derek Chauvin verdict: America is not a racist country FOX News 04/22/2021)

In the video, Hume says just after 1:30 that there "is a nearly unanimous consensus in America against racism. Being called a racist, and being shown to be a racist is about the worst thing that can happen to you. But unfortunately, that's been weaponized now, so the term is flung about with abandon by politicians and, and, others." And Brit doesn't have to explain to FOX News viewers who The Others are.

That is an updated version of the argument circa 1965 in the South that if you used "Negro" or "colored people" but didn't use the n-word in polite company, you weren't any kind of a racist. The current version is that complaining about white racism or calling white racists what they are is completely unacceptable and the correct Republican response is, "Oh, the Mean Libruls are tryin' to cancel me just 'cause ah hate n*****s! Boo, hoo, hoo, hoo!"

The pore white Republicans have to face the "weapon" of being called a racist that is being sprayed all over the place at them by the Mean Libruls. African-American have to worry that any encounter with the police could suddenly turn to them being executed with an actual weapons that fires bullets. According to Brit, "about the worst thing that can happen" to nice Republican white folks is to be called a racist by a Mean Librul or one of The Others.

White people whining gets really tiresome really fast.

(A copy of The 1776 Report as issued by the Trump White House is available from The 1776 Project.)

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 7: The white supremacist narrative for poor and working class whites, then and now

Frank Hyman is a critic of neo-Confederate ideology old and new. And in this essay, he gives his description of how white racism was used before the Civil War and right down to today to keep not just African-Americans but white working people as well as poor and powerless as possible, The Confederacy was a con job on whites. And still is. McClatchy 03/06/2017.

"How did the plantation owners mislead so many Southern whites?" he asks. And gives this answer:

They managed this con job partly with a propaganda technique that will be familiar to modern Americans, but hasn’t received the coverage it deserves in our sesquicentennial celebrations. Starting in the 1840s wealthy Southerners supported more than 30 regional pro-slavery magazines, many pamphlets, newspapers and novels that falsely touted slave ownership as having benefits that would – in today’s lingo – trickle down to benefit non-slave owning whites and even blacks. The flip side of the coin of this old-is-new trickle-down propaganda is the mistaken notion that any gain by blacks in wages, schools or health care comes at the expense of the white working class.

Today’s version of this con job no longer supports slavery, but still works in the South and thrives in pro trickle-down think tanks, magazines, newspapers, talk radio and TV news shows such as the Cato Foundation, Reason magazine, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. These sources are underwritten by pro trickle-down one-per-centers like the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch.

For example, a map of states that didn’t expand Medicaid – which would actually be a boon mostly to poor whites – resembles a map of the old Confederacy with a few other poor, rural states thrown in. Another indication that this divisive propaganda works on Southern whites came in 2012. Romney and Obama evenly split the white working class in the West, Midwest and Northeast. But in the South we went 2-1 for Romney.

Lowering the [Confederate battle] flag because of the harm done to blacks is the right thing to do. We also need to lower it because it symbolizes material harm the ideology of the Confederacy did to Southern whites that lasts even to this day. [my emphasis]

This message directed mainly to white workers to not be conned by billionaires and corporate lobbyists and their propagandists is an important one. It is not a substitute for understanding how white racism affects its main targets, obviously very much including African-Americans.

But it is very much a part of that story. Because you can't have racism without racists.

Trump's "patriotic education", aka, white-supremacist propaganda

Kali Holloway has a useful description of how rightwing historical revisionism works in the US. She uses a statue to Benjamin Tillman (1847-1918) of South Carolina, one of the most rancid white racist politicians in American history, as an example. (American History Is Getting Whitewashed, Again The Nation 10/01/2020)

The South Carolina legislature had a statue of Tillman set up on the state Capitol grounds in 1940, "where it remains, a message of white power and racial terrorism sent straight from the state government."

Tillman explains:

The back draft of historical revisionism always explodes when movements for social justice threaten to upset the status quo. The Tillman statue went up just as the NAACP was fighting for laws against lynching around the United States and as Black demands for basic civil rights were swelling. We are facing a similar moment today. In reaction to protests against racism and the removal of white supremacist statuary across the country, Donald Trump has launched a deliberate effort to suppress and sanitize America’s history. He has derided The New York Times’ 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize–winning essay series that examines the way slavery has shaped every American institution (and which he has definitely not read), likening it to anti-American propaganda and calling it “ideological poison” that “will destroy our country.” He has attacked the teaching of critical race theory as a “form of child abuse” and demeaned it as “a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue.” The president has pledged to withhold federal funds from schools that incorporate the 1619 Project into their curricula and has demanded the cancellation of racial sensitivity trainings for federal employees, directing agencies to halt spending on programs that examine white privilege. According to a tweet from Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Trump “has asked people to report any sightings” of critical race theory. Recently, Trump announced that he is launching the 1776 Commission, which will “promote patriotic education” and “teach our children about the miracle of American history.” [my emphasis]

Trump, of course, has no actual idea what "critical race theory" actually is, only that his white supremacist supporters and advisers like Stephen Miller say it's bad.

Holloway gives a gloomy polemic about the dominant narrative of American history, and ends on a oddly fatalistic note:

Trump and his supporters are waging a bitter fight against racial progress. They believe American history is proprietary, and their birthright includes selectively retelling. He recently admitted as much. “We grew up with a certain history, and now they’re trying to change our history,” he stated. “That's why they want to take down our monuments. That's why they want to take down our statues.” That effort ties him to the slavery apologists, Confederate sympathizers, and historical revisionists who preceded him. Proving the circularity of American history: The more it changes, the more its foundations remain the same. [my emphasis]

There is an important difference between fundamental criticism of an historical period and the recognition of the inevitably contradictory interests and perspectives that have shaped a society over a longer period of time. We have a Constitution in the US that dates back to 1789 and political traditions heavily rooted in the experiences of the colonial period and in European (especially British) political institutions and ideas. So that past is still present in substantial ways, for good and bad.

There are also a variety of historical narratives: official ones promoted by the government, scholarly perspectives, popular mythology. Heather Cox Richardson in her work like How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020) and the related YouTube lecture series, describes how some major historical narratives about American history developed in the context of a society in which freedom for some really has depended on the unfreedom of others. She gives a fascinating account, for instance, of the way the image of the frontier individualist embodied in the Western cowboy was shaped and integrated by the anti-Reconstruction ideology shaped by class and racial agendas.

In the case of the historical narrative of the role of African-Americans in the US, there were always competing narratives, not only in terms of real-time politics but also in larger historical narratives. For instance, even during the long decades that some version of the Lost Cause ideology of the Civil War and Reconstruction dominated even academic institutions, there were always competing narratives. The Journal of Negro History (now the Journal of African-American History), to take one example, provided alternative scholarly accounts beginning in 1916.

Holloway's closing comment about "the circularity of American history: The more it changes, the more its foundations remain the same," seems to imply a circular cycle of historical development with which I wouldn't be comfortable. But the context she provides for Trump's "patriotic education” notion is really helpful. That project is yet another attempt to sponsor an ideological, dishonest white supremacist view of American history.

The arc of history bends toward justice - but not nearly fast enough

As it happens, the current uprisings i the US over police murdering black people comes as I'm taking part in a contemporary history course, the most recent section of which had to do with "1968," aka, The Sixties.

I was reminded about how the various memories and ideological constructions of The Sixties come immediately to many people's minds in a situation like this. Rick Perlstein wrote 12 years ago about the centrality of that period in the way Americans understand current conflicts (Getting Past the '60s? It's Not Going to Happen. History News Network 02/03/2008):

I realize it anew just about every day of this presidential campaign -- most recently when a bevy of Kennedys stood behind Obama last week and spoke of reviving the spirit of Camelot, and when the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks responded by making fine distinctions between "the idealism of the generation that marched in jacket and ties" -- the "early-60s," which he took Obama to represent -- and the "late-60s," defined "by drug use and self-indulgence," of which the Clintons are the supposed avatars.

The fact is, the '60s are still with us, and will remain so for the imaginable future. We are all like Zhou Enlai, who, asked what he thought about the French Revolution, answered, "It is too early to tell." When and how will the cultural and political battle lines the baby boomers bequeathed us dissolve? It is, well and truly, still too early to tell. We can't yet "overcome" the '60s because we still don't even know what the '60s were -- not even close....

Robert Self wrote of the period in "Bodies Count: The Sixties Body in American Politics" in  The Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives (2013):

Innocent black bodies enduring violence became a hallmark of civil rights politics for the next de cade, an inescapable trope embraced by activists and visual media alike. ...

... the black freedom movement of the 1950s and early 1960s turned the violence of white supremacy against the southern racial order by making the oppression of actual bodies visible, especially through the tactical use of visual media. The civil rights generation would deploy black bodies to absorb and dramatize white violence. Then, in the late 1960s Black Power and black nationalism again transformed black bodies, this time into symbols of resistance and self-determination. Black freedom activists made their bodies into emblems of peaceful moral righteousness and, barely a generation later, transformed them into stunning symbols of personal and communal power and political projection. [my emphasis]

I confess that I've never felt like I've ever gotten an adequate conceptual grip on the use of the concepts of "bodies" in the way Self uses it here. He refers to it as “body politics,” which has become a standard academic term, as this article elaborates: Body Politics Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics 2013) But Self's point is a good way to understand part of how the memory of The Sixties, which is still very much a living memory for many, shapes contemporary understandings of politics.

But time obviously didn't stand still since the 1960s. And when we look at today's police violence, there are 50 years of developments since 1970 that shaped today's situation. (Bob Brigham, ‘They just fired on us’: Horrifying videos of cops ‘using journalists for target practice’ in Minneapolis Raw Story 05/30/2020)

There was the much-discussed-but-superficially-understood rise in violent crime that peaked in the early 1990s. There was the bipartisan response to it, which heavily featured laws and accompanying prison sentences that "treated" drug use and possession as felony crimes, when an actual paradigm of treating addiction as a medical condition was what was then and is now needed. There was the infamous federal crime bill of the 1990s and its many state-level imitators. There was the War on Terror that had a notable precursor in the federal reation to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, not all of which was well-conceived. The shift in policing to a even more militarized and counter-insurgency model that resulted has further encouraged the police to see the citizens as an enemy to be feared and fought.

I'm not in a mood at this moment to say anything that might sound remotely sympathetical to murderous psychopaths who happen to be wearing a police uniform. At the same time, part of the real background of the current situation is that the desperate condition among the substantial portion of the American public living in poverty creates conditions in which crime and violence thrive. (Current mainstream political realities would dictate that right here I should insert some qualifications to show I don't want to be seen as a frivolous hippie. But I'm really not in the mood right now.)

As all kind of advocates for the police will quickly point out, there are real violent criminals and real violent gangs who do antisocial things that have to be policed. And, yes, that creates an atmosphere where cops have to be fearful for their lives in even routine traffic stops. And none of that, none of that, justifies four cops choking a black guy to death just because they felt like murdering him.

Treating drug problems first and foremost as medical problems rather than a criminal problem and reducing the flood of small arms that flood American cities would make a huge difference for the better. Anyone who's legitimately worried about having arms for self-defense can deal with any such valid needs with shotguns. The Weimar-1920s-style Patriot Militia type groups can only function to the extent that they do because the police and prosecutors in the US and in European countries are too often "blind in the right eye." Without the willing toleration of at least some police, those groups couldn't function as they do. They can function as goon squads for authoritarian governments and movements. Their rhetoric about using their arsenals to fight for democracy against a tyrannical government is a sick joke.

That's not to say that violent far-right groups aren't a danger to cops and public officials. They very clearly are. That's why their sympathizers need to be kept out of law enforcement because they aren't actually on the side of the rule of law. That's not a matter of censoring opinion. It means that we need cops that both enforce and obey the law and don't kill people of any race unless it's absolutely necessary. White supremacists and their sympathizers and collaborators don't meet that qualification.

It may seem a bit incongrous. But I'll end this with a quote from Jerry Brown, responding to a question about how he was able to be elected as Governor of California in 1974 after St. Reagan's two terms in that position. It's a reflection on social progress that is both thoughtful and jaded. To adapt Obama's quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of history may bend toward justice - but people have to decide to do the bending. From Jerry Brown: A Life in California Politics (Bancroft Library Oral History Center, 2020):

But I would say the fact that I was around, I could understand the value of being somewhat of an outsider. I mean I did have a pilot test. It’s called the 1966 campaign. We have Reagan, we have [Edmund] Brown [Sr., Jerry father who ran against Reagan for a third term as Governor in 1966], and then we see what happens. So unless you’re dense -- and as I said, I think most people are pretty dense, because they believe what should happen, based on their desires, is what must happen. But no, life doesn’t work that way. You know, the fact that we had a Civil War and 400,000 people died - it shouldn’t have been that way. We should have had a nice resolution, ended slavery, and kumbaya - gone on from there. But life doesn’t work that way. That’s why some people write about the tragic sense. That’s something we - I certainly had a familiarity with in my education. [my emphasis in bold]

Adolph Reed on "left-identitarians" vs. "class reductionism"

Ana Kasparian and John Iadarola on The Young Turks of 01/23/2020 reference this piece from last year by Adolph Reed, Jr.: The Myth of Class Reductionism New Republic 09/15/2019.

It deals with the political argument between the corporate-liberal and progressive wings of the Democratic Party, one that has taken on a quasi-theological form, over how to articulate the proper relationships among race relations, women's rights, and economics. It's not a new discussion, nor is it unique to the Democratic Party in the 21st century.

I've tried to avoid the specific incarnations in the current Presidential primary race. In theory, there's not much difference between liberals and progressives over the first two, although policies and priorities are what really count.

On economic issues, the differences are understood similarly on both sides. Progressives want Medicare for All and tax policies aimed at closing the wealth and income gap between the One Percent and everyone else. Liberals don't, although they want policies that move at least somewhat in that direction. Progressives aren't afraid of the Republicans calling them socialist, liberal are. Despite the fact that Republicans have been doing just that for generations.

What I think of as the quasi-theological aspect of the current argument comes from the argument that corporate Democrats use against the progressives, and currently against Bernie Sanders in particular, that they are sexist and racist, though it's usually not put quite that crassly. There's also a Bernie-Sanders-makes-my-skin-crawl argument, but that's not really the same thing. (It's also borderline anti-Semitic.)

The anti-Sanders argument is that Sanders doesn't take white racism and sexism seriously enough, and that his talk about class and redistribution issues are a way to minimize the seriousness of racism and sexism in the US.

Reed refers to the two sides of this controversy as left-identitarian and class-reductionist. The first is probably more obvious than the latter, which refers tot he notion that "that inequalities apparently attributable to race, gender, or other categories of group identification are either secondary in importance or reducible to generic economic inequality." He argues that the class-reductionist position is more a polemical construct. "I know of no one who embraces that position," he writes.

Reed does make an important observation here

As American politics shifted steadily rightward between the Nixon and Clinton presidencies, so, too, did the discourse surrounding race and the country’s political economy. Conservatives attributed black socioeconomic inequalities to bad values; liberals attributed them to bad values and racism. Once it was effectively decoupled from political-economic dynamics, “racism” became increasingly amorphous as a charge or diagnosis - a blur of attitudes, utterances, individual actions, and patterned disparities, an autonomous force that acts outside of historically specific social relations. Today it serves as a single, all-purpose explanation for mass incarceration, the wealth gap, the wage gap, police brutality, racially disproportionate rates of poverty and unemployment, slavery, the Southern Jim Crow regime, health disparities, the drug war, random outbursts of individual bigotry, voter suppression, and more. ...

As Cedric Johnson and Dean Robinson have argued, post-civil rights black politics has tended to emphasize an “ethnic group” notion of racial solidarity that masks the face that this race politics is itself a class politics. Black Democratic and other neoliberal elites have shown again and again in their sustained denunciations of the Sanders program since 2016 that they ultimately rely on race-specific arguments to oppose broadly redistributive initiatives that would improve the circumstances of African American working people along with all others. Ironically, this means that the constituencies most affected by economic inequality and disadvantage have the least voice in contemporary policy debates. [my emphasis]

Of course, in a high-stakes political campaign like the Presidential race, campaigns are going to use dubious attacks. Some of which will be closer to true. Some of which will be less fair than others. Politics is politics.

The liberal, pro-corporate verisons of neoliberalism combines free-market fundmentalism (with a bit more humane face than the conservatives version) with a classic liberal defense of equal rights. In theory, a society with severe class divisions and a severe maldistribution of wealth and income could have complete equality between for minorities and women. There are mountains of rigorous research that show why in practice that cannot and will happen in the real world.

But the soundbite version are always going to be imprecise.

Andrew Bacevich’s "The Age of Illusions" (Review, Part 4 of 4)

The fact that the US is confronted with the kind of serious problems that Bacevich describes does not mean that the country will deal with them in a constructive way. His own description of the nature of Trump’s electoral coalition illustrates that.

The way forward – and what to do about the “deplorables”

This book is reminiscent in some ways of one that appeared at the beginning of Bacevich’s Emerald City period, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Culture of Contentment (1992). He identified some of the large challenges and dangers for American democracy that he saw then. Including the central role that the fear of international Communism had played in the maintenance of the US’ massive military establishment:

The fear of Communism was also responsible for three major developments in the military power as that existed in the political economy of contentment. The first, supplementing and extending what was an already large expenditure, was a further enormous increase in military and defense spending as the constituency of contentment gained full power in the 1980s; this was the Reagan arms buildup. The second was the emergence of a largely autonomous military establishment standing above and apart from democratic control. The third was a series of foreign ventures designed ostensibly to arrest the threatening spread of Communism but with the further purpose of justifying the expanding role of the military establishment by providing a presumed enemy. [my emphasis]

As Bacevich himself has long been explaining, the internal political imperatives connected to the military-industrial complex create strong incentives for an aggressive, interventionist foreign policy. And if one enemy (the “Communist bloc”) goes away, there is not just vague psychological incentives but very material lobbies with ample funding that will be eager to create a new one. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) has recently come under scrutiny for its years-long advocacy for war against Iran. (James Carden, “Will This Billionaire-Funded Think Tank Get Its War With Iran? The Nation 01/08/2020; Nick Wadhams, U.S. Official Central to Hawkish Iran Policies Departs NSC Bloomberg Politics 01/04/2020; John Judis, The Little Think Tank That Could Slate 08/10/2015)

Galbraith concluded his book on an explicit note of “sadness”:

Books of this genre are expected to have a happy ending. With awareness of what is wrong, the corrective forces of democracy are set in motion. And perhaps they would be now were they in a full democracy - one that embraced the interests and votes of all the citizens. Those now outside the contented majority would rally, or, more precisely, could be rallied, to their own interest and therewith to the larger and safer public interest. Alas, however, we speak here of a democracy of those with the least sense of urgency to correct what is wrong, the best insulation through short-run comfort from what could go wrong.

A key point of Galbraith’s notion of the contented majority is the low voter participation in the US. The 2018 midterm election produced a striking increase in voter participation which produced a distinct shift to the Democrats and away from Trumpism. As Galbraith emphasized, the wealthy and more affluent Americans have high voting participation rates, while the participation rate of the less affluent is distinctly lower. That means the portion of the electorate that votes is considerably financially better off, whiter, older, and more conservative than the American people, the potential electorate. The Republicans are acutely aware of this fact and want to preserve that condition. Thus, they have aggressively pursued segregationist voter-suppression measures against black and Latino voters, measures that also often affect poor whites, as well.

This is one of the fundamental challenges for actually fixing the serious problems that Bacevich describes. Another is the extreme effect of private money in political campaigns, already a serious problem in 1992, far more extreme now in the Citizens United era. Those are both serious limitations on American democracy.

And with the vast increase of Executive power that Bacevich identifies as one of the four basic markers of the Emerald City era, the undemocratic nature of the Electoral College system has become a bigger problem than ever now that, as he says, the Presidency is “overshadowing every other aspect of American politics.”

Moving away from neoliberal globalism is as necessary as it is difficult. This in itself requires not only confronting oligarchical power, but reducing it. And that inevitably involves not just limiting but reversing the current staggering concentrations of wealth and income. Rightwing populism will not fix those problems. But far-right populists like Steve Bannon do mobilize around those issues. The model “illiberal democracy” in the European Union right now is Viktor Orbáns Hungary that combines oligarchic rule with a certain level of social support for the less affluent with xenophobic nationalism and unaccountable oligarchic rule. In the United States, the progressive left offers a meaningful counter-appeal to that particular anti-neoliberal perspective. The corporate Democrats embrace corporate-deregulation neoliberalism. Any successful movement to build constructive political alternatives to neoliberal globalism will also have to be backed by a much-expanded labor union movement.

Moving away from militarized global dominance by the US will require a political movement that demands drastic changes in the current interventionist foreign policy, most obviously an end to the Forever War approach currently being pursued by Republican and Democratic administrations, including Trump’s. It will also require a major reduction in the US military budget and a major de-mystifying of the military in American political culture. As Bacevich points out in this book and elsewhere, the current idolatry of the military coincides with an unprecedented isolation of those actually bearing the burden of military service from the large majority of the American people. This situation needs to be countered either by military proscription (the draft) or by providing other concrete incentives to make military service more attractive to “middle class” families. But only a draft is likely to ensure that people like Trumps and Bushes would share even remotely equally in military service.

It’s less clear how the situation Bacevich problematizes as “freedom, empowerment, and choice became all but interchangeable terms” can be resolved in any short term. White racism is real, it’s damaging, and it’s wrong. It’s been an effective mobilizing tool for conservative and reactionary politics for the entire history of the Republic. Bacevich notes how not only did Obama’s election did not end racism against African-Americans, it was met by a militant racist counter-display. And gruesome elements of white racism like the often wanton murder of unarmed black men by white cops and the grossly disproportionate effect of law like prohibiting marijuana usage have had on African-American men.

Women’s rights have not yet been fully realized and the political assault on the core right to abortion – a right that is distinctly a woman’s right – is intense. Antiabortionists have gone a long way in many parts of the country to seriously restrict women’s access to abortion.

And as we’ve seen during the Trump Administration particularly, many Republicans are willing to literally howl in approval at Trump’s Nuremberg rallies for hostility to Latinos and immigrants, including the sadistic kidnapping of children from their parents and caging them in brutal and even life-threatening conditions.

And this is where a general appeal that “the proximate aim should not be to obscure differences but to sharpen them further and thereby give them meaning” misses a critical element of the current situation. In the “cultural wars”, the current polarization is asymmetrical. Black people aren’t demanding that unarmed, young white men be murdered by rogue cops proportional to how young black men are murdered. Democrats may be overly fond of partisan gerrymandering, but they aren’t aggressively purging white voters from voter rolls. Women’s rights advocates aren’t demanding that women who don’t won’t abortions have abortions forced on them. Latinos aren’t demanding that native-born white children be kidnapped from their parents, caged, and occasionally allowed to die on the concrete floors of their cages. And there are no Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden rallies where angry mobs howl for such things.

Bacevich notes, not entirely inaccurately that Hillary Clinton in 2016 “conveyed a distinct cluelessness, as illustrated by her infamous dismissal of Trump's supporters as ‘deplorables’.” But the truth is that people who enjoy the thought of immigrant children being kidnapped from their parents are deplorable. People who chant “blue lives matter” as approval of extralegal murders of unarmed black people are deplorable. Christian fundamentalists who want to not only ban abortion but also jail or execute abortion doctors and women who do get abortions – or even jail women who have miscarriages! – they are deplorable. And for a non-trivial number of those taking such positions, their prejudices and hatreds are generally more important to them than even the economic well-being of themselves or their children. White nationalist identity politics provides some real psychological rewards. And people who are strongly authoritarian are always going to be attracted to characters like Trump who they can image as a Stern Heroic Leader.

The point here is not that people firmly attached to such positions are incorrigible for life on such matters. Some of them are. Others are actually capable of having a real dialogue and altering their viewpoints and viewing their own experience in a more complex way. For the hardcores, as David Neiwert writes in his book Alt-America (2017), “There’s really no point in trying to reach out to people who will only return your hand as a bloody stump. The only thing they understand, in the end, is brute political force: being thrashed at the ballot box, and in the public discourse.”

In other words, white racism, sexism, and xenophobia have to be challenged and defeated for democracy and social equality to flourish. And in the current situation of asymmetric polarization, no mutual live-and-let-live attitude between white racists and minorities, between fanatical antiabortionists and women, between rabid xenophobes and decent people. Which means that anti-discrimination laws and regulations as well as special protections for electoral rights will be absolute necessary for the foreseeable future. Asymmetric polarization is real, and it can’t be ignored or wished away.

Part 1: From Boone City to the Emerald City

Part 2: The Emerald City Presidencies

Part 3: Bacevich’s political perspective

Part 4: The way forward – and what to do about the “deplorables”

More on (a few) white evangelical conservatives trying to distance themselves from the embarrassment known as Donald Trump

The Christianity Today editorial supporting the Senate to convict Trump on impeachment charges got predictable pushback from the Christian Right. CT has followed up with a supportive piece by their president, Timothy Dalrymple (The Flag in the Whirlwind: An Update from CT’s President 12/22/2019)

It doesn't distance itself from the position of the earlier editorial, on which I commented here a few days ago.

But it does contain this somewhat puzzling qualification, noting that the impeachment editorial was signed by editor-in-chief Mark Galli:

CT does not have an editorial board. Editors publish under their own names. Yet Galli has stood in the trenches for men and women of faith for over three decades. He has been an outstanding editor in chief. While he does not speak for everyone in the ministry — our board and our staff hold a range of opinions - he carries the editorial voice of the magazine. We support CT’s editorial independence and believe it’s vital to our mission for the editor in chief to speak out on the issues of the day.

For whatever reason, CT does not formally call "the editorial voice of the magazine" an editorial board.

Aside from a Mad King Trump outburst on Twitter, some of the usual suspects did an open letter to CT, the signatories including noted Christian scholars Michele Bachmann, Gary Bauer, James "beat-the-kids" Dobson, Mike "the Huck" Huckabee, Cindy Jacobs, Robert "let's-have-a-civil-war" Jeffress, Eric Metaxas, and Ralph Reed. (Melissa Barnhart, Nearly 200 evangelical leaders slam Christianity Today for questioning their Christian witness Christian Post 12/22/2019)

Neither of the two CT pieces use the word "white" anywhere. But the problem they are addressing is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of white evangelical Christians. As Nathalie Baptiste notes (A Christian Magazine Called for Trump’s Removal. Top Evangelicals Say It’s A Liberal Plot. Mother Jones 12/20/2019):

White evangelicals have always been Trump’s most unwavering allies and voting base, but the impeachment question may have begun to splinter even that group. An October Public Religion Research Institute found that 99 percent of white evangelicals opposed impeachment. (In contrast to the 86 percent of Black Protestants who disapprove of the president.)

You can find stories written by reporters of major media outlets who venture out into the wilds outside the Beltway Village bubble and quote mysterious self-identified evangelicals out in the "heartland" explaining why they support Trump. It's only a mystery to people who somehow haven't managed to catch one of the basic facts about American politics, which is that there is a massive overlap between "self-identified white evangelicals" and "white people who really don't like black people (or Latinos, or gays, or immigrants, or wimmin) very much".

The Christian Post article linked above does mention someone criticizing Mark Galli for supposedly dissing those pore, picked-on white evangelicals that the Mean Libruls criticize just because they're so prejudiced against some many people. Why cain't them Libruls show some respect for POPs (people of prejudice), huh, answer me that!

Here's how Dalrymple dances around that particular (white) elephant in the room:

Out of love for Jesus and his church, not for political partisanship or intellectual elitism, this is why we feel compelled to say that the alliance of American evangelicalism with this presidency has wrought enormous damage to Christian witness. It has alienated many of our children and grandchildren. It has harmed African American, Hispanic American, and Asian American brothers and sisters. And it has undercut the efforts of countless missionaries who labor in the far fields of the Lord. While the Trump administration may be well regarded in some countries, in many more the perception of wholesale evangelical support for the administration has made toxic the reputation of the Bride of Christ.

Galli’s editorial focused on the impeachment, but it was clear the issues are deeper and broader. Reasonable people can differ when it comes to the flagrantly partisan impeachment process. But this is not merely about impeachment, or even merely about President Trump. He is not the sickness. He is a symptom of a sickness that began before him, which is the hyper-politicization of the American church. This is a danger for all of us, wherever we fall on the political spectrum. Jesus said we should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. With profound love and respect, we ask our brothers and sisters in Christ to consider whether they have given to Caesar what belongs only to God: their unconditional loyalty. [my emphasis]

But Dalrymple makes sure to not identify the Christian Right's political goals with the President they criticize because his a serious embarrassing, sleazy criminal:

The problem is not that we as evangelicals are associated with the Trump administration’s judicial appointments or its advocacy of life, family, and religious liberty. We are happy to celebrate the positive things the administration has accomplished. ...

Similarly, this is neither a criticism of the evangelical Trump voter nor an endorsement of the Democrats. The 2016 election confronted evangelical voters with an impossible dilemma: Vote for a pro-choice candidate whose policies would advance so much of what we oppose, or vote for an extravagantly immoral candidate who could well damage the standing of the republic and the witness of the church. Countless men and women we hold in the highest regard voted for President Trump, some wholeheartedly and some reluctantly. Friends we love and respect have also counseled and worked within the Trump administration. We believe they are doing their best to serve wisely in a fallen world.

Authoritarian atttudes toward women are bound up with the antiabortion position, and militarnt antiabortion groups in the United States have been a key element in spawning not only "mainstream" partisan fanaticism but also the hardcore, violent far-right brand. And the fundamentalist version of "faimily" (patriarchal, heteronormative, excessive sexual repression) and "religious liberty" (effectively treating conservative Christianity as a state religion) are very much part of the authoritarian, anti-democratic "sickness that began before" Trump. Pretending that Trump is somehow an anomaly for today's Republican Party is ducking the reality of the asyymmetric polarization with see in the radicalism of that party.

And, "Friends we love and respect have also counseled and worked within the Trump administration. We believe they are doing their best to serve wisely in a fallen world," applied to people who willingly serve in appointive positions in the Trump Administration is a mealy-mouthed version of "they were just following orders."

David Neiwert recalls the Red Summer of 1919

Dave Neiwert has a three-part post commemorating the racial violence of 1919, which civil rights leader and songwriter James Weldon Johnson labelled as the Red Summer, "red" in this case referring to the blood spilled. The was a "Red Scare" under way, as well, but that red was about anything that liberals and rightwingers thought was kind of Bolshevik-y.

The three parts of "The Red Summer, 100 Years Later" post are here:

• The centennial Americans want to forget, but need to remember 11/28/2019
• 1919 was a yearlong litany of white brutality against black Americans 11/29/2019
• Its legacy of racial division and hate is buried in our demography 11/30/2019

As he writes:

These events were in many ways the fevered culmination of the long campaign after the Civil War to reverse its outcome by putting the now-freed slaves in a continued state of submission by other means - violent ones.

The centerpiece of this campaign was lynching. As a form of terrorism intended to keep black people from participating in the political process or from even objecting to their subjugation under Jim Crow laws, it was brutally effective. Between 1870 and 1930, literally thousands of black people were summarily executed by their white neighbors, most often for the crime of being somehow “uppity” - that is, a threat to the whites’ own social status in one way or another.

Whites rioting against blacks in Chicago, 1919 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Anti-black mass violence took place during 1919 in Chicago, Omaha, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and various other places. He describes several horrifying instances like this one, in which class hostilities played notable role:

None of these events, however, approached the events of Sept. 30-Oct. 1 in Elaine, Arkansas - in many ways the horrifying climax of the Red Summer - for sheer lethality: An estimated 100 to 237 black people, most of them poor farmers, were killed, along with five white men. The Elaine Massacre was fueled by racial animus, but the ongoing system of economic oppression in the South was also key: At a Sept. 30 gathering of about 100 sharecroppers for a Progressive Farmers and Household Union event, gunfire broke out in the front lot.

Even before this gathering, whites had been fed a bizarre set of vicious smears about the Progressive Farmers organization - such as a headline in a Helena, Arkansas, paper describing it as “established for the purpose of banding Negroes together for the killing of white people.” Two white men who had pulled up in a car were shot, one of them fatally. A posse estimated at as many as 1,000 men arrived to put down the “insurrection.” Troops intervened, so the white mobs spread out across the countryside and began slaughtering black people.

It was indiscriminate slaughter. Even the troops who had been sent to stop the rioting wound up shooting black people randomly. It only ended after troops had been there several days. Afterward, black landowners claimed their land was stolen, too. [my emphasis]

In the third part, he describes the subsequent heritage of the Red Summer's violence, which was part of the long history of often murderous white hostility to black citizens after the Civil War.

The first part of Dave's post brings up the connection of the Red Summer events to the discussion over reparations for slavery and segregation. I've written some in this blog about the practical difficulties even a serious attempt to create a reparations program would face. But incidents like the lynchings and so-called race riots do open a way to understanding the concept of reparations. Defining something so broad as the legacy of slavery from the start of the African slave trade to the Civil War in a way that could be translated into a meaningfully related reparations program would be an incredibly daunting task, even assuming the political will and consensus to do it. Which is not to say it shouldn't be attempted.

But in the case of post-First World War riots in a city like Omaha, for instance, many of the victims were identified. Their descedants can be traced and compensated directly. Or some meaningful action could be taken that would benefit the current African-American community. That's not to say it would necessarily be easy. But it is easier to envision how the government could design reparations for a particular event of violence with the identities of the victims documented than to think about how to say, make reparations for people who were enslaved in 1800. Although it's important to add that slaveowners did keep extensive records identifying their slaves, as Caitlin Rosenthal explains in her Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (2018). She even credits Southern planters for inventing the accounting concept of depreciation, measuring how the value of an owned asset declines over time, because they wanted to keep track of the current market value of their human property.

Additional pieces on the Red Summer:

• Valerie Elverton Dixon, Remembering the Red Summer of 1919-Part One Tikkun 08/02/2019 (There doesn't seem to have been a Part 2.)
• Mark Ellis, J. Edgar Hoover and the "Red Summer" of 1919 Journal of American Studies 28:1 (April 1994)
• Charles Henry, Remembering the Red Summer of 1919 Berkeley Blog 03/02/2019
• Abigail Higgins, Red Summer of 1919: How Black WWI Vets Fought Back Against Racist Mobs History.com 07/26/2019
• David Krugler, A Mob in Uniform: Soldiers and Civilians in Washington's Red Summer, 1919 Washington History 21:2009
• Keenan Norris, Red Summer 1919/2019: The 100th Anniversary of a Current Crisis Los Angeles Review of Books 08/15/2019
• Stanley Norvell and William Tuttle, Jr., Views of a Negro During "The Red Summer" of 1919 Journal of Negro History 51:3 (July 1966)
• Rebecca Onion, Red Summer Slate 03/04/2015
• The Red Summer: Chicago's race riots remembered 100 years on – in pictures Guardian 07/27/2019
• Red Summer: The Race Riots of 1919 National World War I Museum (n/d; accessed 12/01/2019)
• W. Bruce Wheeler, Knoxville Riot of 1919 Tennessee Encyclopedia12/05/2018
• Matthew Wills, The Mob Violence of the Red Summer JSTOR Daily 05/14/2019
• Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, The Red Summer of 1919, Explained Teen Vogue 04/08/2019 (It's one of the more interesting surprises in American reporting that Teen Vogue now runs some of the more notable articles on political topics. This piece is part of "a Teen Vogue series where we unearth history not told through a white, cisheteropatriarchal lens".)
• Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, Remembering Red Summer - Which Textbooks Seem Eager to Forget Zinn Education Project 04/08/2019

The Both Sides Do It! alibi for white supremacist terrorism

This may be a case of giving a tiny amplification to a bad piece of political propaganda.

But Trump and the Republicans playing Both Sides Do It on two mass murders this past weekend, one by a white supremacist terrorist in El Paso complete with a racist-nationalist manifesto justifying it, the other by a young man who murdered his own sister and others outside w nightclub in Dayton OH for which there seems to be no evidence at all of political motivations in the shooting.

It always important to remember that that in the US legal system three is a presumption of innocence on criminal charges. The suspect in the Dayton killings was himself killed by police in the incident. The suspect in El Paso was arrested. In his case, the event was a very public one and the shooter was seen by many witnesses and caught on security cameras.

Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian analyse White House spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway's version of it in Kellyanne Conway's IDIOTIC Statement on Dayton Shooter The Young Turks 08/07/2019:

The FBI in an official statement made clear they were approaching the El Paso mass murder as a terrorist event, the Dayton one as a murder (FBI Statement Regarding Shootings in El Paso and Dayton 08/04/2019):

The attack in El Paso, Texas, underscores the continued threat posed by domestic violent extremists and perpetrators of hate crimes. The FBI is supporting its state and local partners in Texas through investigative, intelligence, and technical assistance. The El Paso investigation is also being supported by the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism-Hate Crimes Fusion Cell, which was established in spring 2019. Composed of subject matter experts from both the Criminal Investigative and Counterterrorism Divisions, the fusion cell offers program coordination from FBI Headquarters, helps ensure seamless information sharing across divisions, and augments investigative resources.

The FBI is also providing assistance to the Dayton (Ohio) Police Department’s investigation into the shooting in Dayton, through the Bureau’s Cincinnati Field Office, with support from FBI Headquarters personnel.

The Guardian reports the following on Wednesday (FBI says Dayton gunman who killed nine explored 'violent ideologies' – live 08/07/2019):

• The FBI said investigators have uncovered evidence that the Dayton shooter explored “violent ideologies”. The bureau has opened an investigation alongside the Dayton police department’s homicide investigation.
• White House aides have sought to elevate reports that the Dayton gunman supported leftwing ideas and endorsed 2020 candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, but the FBI said the shooter did not appear to be linked to a “bias motive”.

Claudia Koerner reports in The Dayton Mass Shooter Had An "Obsession With Violent Ideations" And The FBI Is Investigating Buzzfeed News 08/06/2019, "In Dayton, investigators have yet to determine if Betts [the killer] was motivated by a particular ideology, but evidence has so far revealed that he was seeking out information that promoted violence, FBI Special Agent in Charge Todd Wickerham said."

Napp Nazworth at the Christian-fundamentalist-oriented Christian Post wasn't nearly as reserved, coming out with this report on Monday, El Paso, Dayton shootings appear motivated by opposite sides of political spectrum 08/05/2019. Both Sides Do It!

The Christian Post's homepage as of this writing on 08/07/2019 displays this:

The fact is we have a Republican President actively inciting hatred and violence against immigrants and racial minorities and some far-right militants are taking violent, murderous action in furtherence of those hatreds.

The Christian Post is obviously trying to keep itself comfortable for Republicans by tiptoing around the white supremacy and terrorism problems. Richard Land, who passes for a sort of moderate in those circles, writes in the CP (We need more dialogue about the many contributing factors of mass shootings 08/05/2019):

Several vexing problems rending the social fabric of our nation immediately come to mind to jumpstart the honest and frank discussion we must have: Fatherlessness; the failure of our inner cities; racism; identity politics that forever emphasize our differences rather than our common humanity; the mindless glorification of violence in our media and entertainment industry; our failed mental health system; and the systematic disrespect and mocking of police officers, and by implication, disrespect for the law they represent. That’s just the preliminary first draft of a long list of contributing causes.

Here the list with my translations out of RepublicanSpeak in italics:

Fatherlessness [black people! sluts!]; the failure of our inner cities [scary black people!]; racism [black peole! brown people!]; identity politics [feminists! gays! black people! lesbian professors!] that forever emphasize our differences rather than our common humanity [black people are racists!]; the mindless glorification of violence in our media and entertainment industry [the NRA is God!]; our failed mental health system [the NRA is God and Trump is his Prophet!]; and the systematic disrespect and mocking of police officers [scary black people! dope-smoking hippies!], and by implication, disrespect for the law they represent [we should celebrate when white cops murder unarmed black people!].

The Christian Post really isn't much into that leftie idea about the Good Samaritan and all.

They have run some pieces nominally condemning white supremacy as an ideology. (You can't call me a racist and if you do YOU'RE the real racist!)

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 15: More on Nazism and the American example of white racism

In yesterday's "Heritage" post, I mentioned the James Whitman book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017). which talks about the ways that the Hitler regime looked to American examples for ways to craft racist laws.

Omer Aziz reviews Whitman's book in America Through Nazi Eyes Dissent Winter 2019, which provides some useful perspective on that historical phenomenon.

Before getting more into Aziz' essay, I want to emphasize that this historical influence shouldn't be seen as some particularly perverse case of American Exceptionalism, in which other countries were just following the bad example set by the United States. Europe and Germany had their own histories of white racism and anti-Semitism long before Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, long before Jonestown and the Puritans landing in Massachusetts.

The Studies in Prejudice sponsored by the American Jewish Committee in the 1940s is best known for the publication The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by Theodore Adorno and others. Another volume in that series is Rehearsal For Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (1949). I did a series of five posts about Massing's book, starting with Political anti-Semitism in Germany, 1871-1914 (1 of 5): politics in the Kaiserreich 06/27/2011. As I noted in that series, organized anti-Semitism as it manifested itself in Imperial German politics in the second half of the 19th century up to 1895 revolve around two movements: the Berlin Movement led by Adolf Stoecker (1835-1909) and the pseudo-scientific racial agitation, led by characters like Hermann Ahlwardt (1846-1914), Otto Böckel (1859-1923), Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933), Ernst Henrici (1854-1915), Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904) and Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg (1848-1911). Eugen Dühring (1833-1921), who is mainly remembered today as the target of fierce polemics by Nietzsche and Engels, was also a significant promoter of racial anti-Semitism.

Despite the limits of specifically racial anti-Semitic politics during that period, the advocacy of racial anti-Semitism promoted a prejudice that later and more successful advocates of peusdoscientific racial anti-Semitism would effectively exploit. Nazi anti-Semitism in the 20th century was notably influenced by ideologues like the Brit Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Hitler himself was heavily influence by the toxic brand of anti-Semitism he sought out during his youthful years in Vienna, which included the political example of longtime mayor Karl Lueger (1844-1910), as well as fringy crackpots like former monk Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954) and Guido von List (1848-1919).

George Masse extensively documented the evolution of Nazi ideology in books like Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (1978).

The American examples of racist legislation and attitudes were processed by the Nazis through a particular European and German viewpoint heavily influenced by extreme German nationalism, pseudoscientific racism, and the rightwing cultural-political völkisch movement.

But there was plenty for them to find useful in the legal structures of white racism in the US. Aziz writes that in June 1934:

Nazi lawyers, jurists, and medical doctors gathered under the auspices of Justice Minister Franz Gürtner to discuss how to codify the Prussian Memorandum [of 1933 on Nazifying the German legal code]. The very first item discussed was U.S. law: “Almost all the American states have race legislation,” Gürtner averred, before detailing a myriad of examples, includingthe many states that criminalized mixed marriages. Roland Freisler, the murderous Nazi judge, stated at the meeting that U.S. jurisprudence would “suit us perfectly.” All the participants displayed either an eager interest in, or an avowed knowledge of, U.S. law. This went beyond specific legislation. The Nazis looked to an innovative legal culture that found ways to relegate Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and others to second- and third-class status; the many devious pathways around the constitutional guarantees of equal protection; the deliberate textual ambiguity on the definition of race itself; the draconian penalties for sexually consorting with a lesser race, or even meeting publicly. The United States in the 1930s was the apogee of a racist state. [my emphasis]

This is also a sobering reminder:

From a contemporary U.S. perspective, however, the most interesting area of influence that Whitman explores is in immigration law. From the outset, the United States had a racially restricted immigration regime. The Naturalization Act of 1790, passed by the First Congress, limited immigration to “free white person[s].” In the 1800s, the United States passed more racially exclusionary immigration laws because of the perceived threat of Asians. As Whitman notes, the Nazis “almost never mentioned the American treatment of blacks without also mentioning the American treatment of other groups, in particular Asians and Native-Americans.” The Chinese were excluded from citizenship in the late 1800s, and the Asiatic Barred Zone of 1917 expressly banned immigration from a whole swath of Asia. Finally, the Immigration Act of 1924 set racial quotas for those who could enter the United States, and banned Indians, Japanese, Chinese, and other Asians outright, along with nearly all Arabs. Under the Cable Act of 1922, if a woman married an Asian man, her U.S. citizenship would be revoked.  [my emphasis]

I'm cautious about casual optimism about American democracy. Because taking democracy too casually inevitably weakens democratic institutions. But I like the way Aziz frames the dynamic contradictory ideas and practices that have always been part of the American experience:

The United States is a nation with two radically different ideas at its heart: white supremacy and equality under the law. A nation that currently has more immigrants than any country in the world but is undergoing traumatic convulsions at the very mention of immigrants. A nation with a pessimistic mind and an optimistic soul, founded and codified by white men, whose geographic expansion was made possible by the violent clearing out of the original inhabitants, whose economic growth was purchased through slavery, but also a land where millions of immigrants have come in search of work and opportunity. The question of who counts in the “we” and who belongs to the “them” is being argued and fought every day, from the courtroom to the classroom to the streets. It is a conversation that has been taking place since the founding of the United States, and one that was taking place in Germany when the Nazi cabal seized the state. How this nation answers that question will determine which of the two American ideas lives on. [my emphasis]

And he also describes the broad sweep of American history in a way that is both realistic and informative when it comes to what has been called a "usuable past":

It is not white supremacy that differentiates America from Nazi Germany, but rather the constitutional architecture of this country - a democratic system tested, broken, remade, rewritten. Racism in the United States is counterbalanced by an emancipatory spirit. The Constitution enshrined slavery, but this same Constitution was transformed as a result of the bloodiest war in U.S. history, which ended the Southern slave empire. The Civil War was a second American founding, and the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments advanced the American spirit of equality before the law. Even amid the racist terror that lasted long after the Civil War, African Americans made room in the United States to fight for their freedom, equality, and dignity. Nazi Germany, by contrast, was a totalitarian state, and its express objective was the erasure of the Jewish people. These differences cannot be minimized.  [my emphasis]