Many of you are familiar with the concept of racism being America’s original sin. The Three-Fifths Compromise that counted slaves as 3/5’s of a human being for the purposes of representation, and only for that purpose, is far more telling than the idea of original sin. Where original sin implies a legacy you inherit through no fault of your own and bear the burden of, The Compromise was more a forging of a direction, an unwillingness to stand for anything except the reduction of economic restrictions and the capacity to hoard wealth, both individually and nationally. Though there was a great deal of resistance to The Compromise, in the end the priority was getting the boot of taxation off the necks of the people that were paying them, and those people were the wealthy.
So it passed.
We turned our back on the issue for a very long time, but gradually the world shed itself of the barbarism of slavery and the United States became an outlier, a relic of the past. Spain abolished the slave trade in 1820 with the exception of Cuba which would have human property up until 1888. The British Empire passed the Abolition Act in 1834 abolishing slavery throughout the realm. France followed in 1847 and Brazil in 1850. With the world awakening to the fundamental inhumanity of the practice, half of America was holding on to the economic advantages of it as being the greater good. The new Republican Party would bring the issue to a head, and their new leader, Abraham Lincoln, would take it on directly. Slave holders found the idea so unacceptable that the country very quickly descended into Civil War and at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives slavery became an American footnote.
What never went away was the idea that rich white people should rule America.
Lincoln had grand ideas about how the country should heal and how this new concept of humanity would lift the country toward its aspirations, but he was quickly disavowed of the idea in the most permanent terms. With his assassination, Andrew Johnson became the 17th President of the United States, a leftover from Lincoln’s Team of Rivals and a southern states-rights supporter and Lincoln’s dreams of reconciliation disappeared almost before they began.
Nathan Bedford Forrest had been a decorated general in the Confederate Army and had amassed a substantial fortune as a cotton plantation owner and slave trader. He organized the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan, made up mostly of resentful Confederate veterans, becoming its first Grand Dragon from 1867-69. Their purpose was the violent intimidation of blacks, yanks and Republicans. Though he ordered their disbandment, the die had been cast. The Civil War had not been a war at all. It had simply been another battle in a continuing struggle.
Reconstruction had been initially imagined by Lincoln two years before the end of the war, but its enactment fell to Andrew Johnson. Johnson issued a blanket pardon to all Southern whites with the exception of the Confederate leadership and the wealthy planters, the latter largely receiving individual pardons over time. Though states coming back into the Union had to reject slavery, secession and be responsible for their war debts, Johnson would otherwise leave them to restructure themselves as they saw fit. They took advantage of their newfound freedom to govern themselves and initiate Black Codes, effectively continuing the practice of slavery without violating the exact terms of the armistice.
Northern Republicans pushed back against Johnson’s laissez-faire attitudes and eventually Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act over his veto. It led to the first major expansion of the Bill of Rights with the passage of the 14th Amendment giving birthright citizenship and later the 15th Amendment prohibiting states from restricting voting rights based on race. While Reconstruction made strides, most of its gains were lost. For ten years the South was divided into five military districts and a period of Radical Reconstruction was attempted, during which time black men became congressmen, senators and held various state and local leadership positions. But gradually the pendulum swung again, Republicans starting to react to the failing southern economy and looking for a scapegoat. White pushback against the advancement of the black population was inevitable, and as the 1870’s came toward a close, only three southern states were still in Republican control. With the only fixed presidential race in our country’s history, by another famous compromise, Rutherford Hayes was inaugurated as President with the agreement that he would acknowledge Democratic control of the remaining Republican southern states, and Reconstruction was over. In a very short time the black population in the south was completely disenfranchised, and by the turn of the century Jim Crow ruled the south.
The Civil War had been a mere battle. The war had never ended.
The white man completely dominated the first half of the 20th century in America.
The next battle came when soldiers came home after World War II, receiving all kinds of help in the form of low cost loans, education, housing advantages and other benefits from living in the only country that had won the war without being physically touched by it. While the world dug out of rubble and attempted to reinvent an infrastructure, our factories simply retooled from wartime goods and materials to things needed both nationally and globally and the economic golden era began. The myth of exceptionalism expanded in the face of the good fortune of geographic isolation from catastrophe. While still struggling, the black community started to become activated by the hypocrisy of having made the same sacrifices in the war and then being red-lined in many ways, being refused the spoils of a country on a bender, drunk with its own good fortune.
The Civil Rights Movement began in the fifties and lasted almost twenty years. Monumental legislation was passed that codified in law the equality of every citizen, led by an unlikely hulking Texan Lyndon B. Johnson. This was another battle in the War of White Supremacy, which is really just a money grab. The money guys took a hit at the hands of government with the empowerment of a part of the citizenry not sympathetic to their idea of a proper top-down economy.
Then came Reagan. Government was recast as the enemy, not a tool for the betterment of the country and its people. The taxation that had allowed the rise of the most robust middle class in the history of the planet was unwound, the money went screaming to the top and it has not stopped since, reaching new grotesque heights under Trump with the destruction of all protection for Americans that regulations had sought to provide and taxation being all but eliminated for companies large enough to figure it out. With the swing in the Supreme Court to a “conservative” majority corporations received the same rights as the man on the street but with trillions of more dollars to use these rights as they saw fit. They also discovered the wisdom to unwind some of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that allowed the states to once again reinvent voting laws to prevent people that just don’t think right from voting at all.
Another battle. Same war.
The two most impactful stories in the news as I record this are the gutting of voting rights across the country and the brutalization of people of color by people in powerful positions. This includes systemic racism within our law enforcement ranks as well as in our seats of government. The same war that began with the Three-Fifths Compromise is still being fought. White men with money are not inclined to let it go, and there is really nothing that is off the table in the effort to retain the spoils of a system that was ostensibly designed to be of, by and for the people. There is no “enough”, because if there were they won a long time ago. The unequal distribution of wealth in this country has never been greater in our history. They figured out how to steal our rights and our money and to get 75 million of us to vote for it. Only 80 million people prevented that from being game, set and match.
Another battle, nearly lost.
Nothing is won. If you want even the most basic sense of fairness in this country you need to awaken the progressive within you right now. You are being lied to in the most blatant and simplistic ways with the broadest of strokes, and you are the victim in this story. If you think these voting laws are about having an I.D., you have been played in the most egregious ways. If you think police are under attack, you are white and just don’t understand the threat being of color represents.
The war is wealthy white men against everyone else. They are more than holding their own. If these voter restricting laws get passed and are not reversed by federal legislation they will have the tools in hand to finally end the war. Your vote will be irrelevant, because if it isn’t helpful it will be eliminated. If you are black and unarmed and murdered by a police officer your executioner will be exonerated and there will be nothing you can do about it. They will be protected by laws that will be enacted to unleash their unilateral power. Unbeknownst to them, they will also be victims, foot soldiers in a war fighting for the wrong side. Fighting for people that don’t care about them in the least, all for 50 grand and a pension after 20 while facing greater and greater risk as the population begins to seethe.
Old fears are still being stoked to new and great effect. The “red” scare of the fifties led to the bogie man of socialism and the deification of capitalism as the delivery system of the American Dream. Any idea, policy or law forwarded that benefits the people as a whole is attacked as an affront to the individuals rights. Truman lamented this very tactic of his political adversaries as they tried to stand in the way of social security, medicare, labor laws and other universal benefits to the people of this country. Nothing has changed. Health care took 50 years to get a very substandard law passed, and it has been attacked and undermined ever since. The rich white men have convinced an enormous number of victims that some of their fellow citizens don’t deserve to get help when they are ill because…capitalism. They didn’t earn enough, work hard enough, so fuck ’em. The cream rises to the top. Sorry you didn’t make the cut.
We just sacrificed over half a million of our fellows because we wouldn’t make inconvenient adjustments to help each other, because the lie of individual rights over everything else benefits the rich white men. If you are completely without restrictions to your behavior for the common good, guess what? So are they! Don’t tell them not to put coal ash in your drinking water. Don’t tell them to cap their factory emissions. Don’t tell them they have to pay tax on capital gains. Don’t tell them they can’t keep blacks out of their condos.
FREEDOM!
When they win the war, compromise has become our legacy. Our global reputation is in tatters, as it should be. We have been shouting the cries of freedom for a century or two, and the curtain is being drawn back, the fascist underpinnings showing with less and less artifice as the final victory nears. Our history of hypocrisy is being spotlighted now, out of the shadows and strutting with goosestep pride. When even the charade of us reaching for a more perfect union is left in tatters, the world has less and less reason to keep fighting the good fight too, for if we fall so does their support for a better world. Who is left to back up the good guys when the good guys give up the ghost?
A reasonable set of bookends for the Trump presidency are his response to the Proud Boys marching on Charlottesville and the January 6th insurrection. Plenty of events in between highlight the representative nature of these two parentheses, and with all of that he came within 5 percentage points of winning. All of it was acceptable to nearly half of us. More than half of all Republicans have been victimized by The Big Lie and even now believe that the election was stolen and that Joe Biden is illegitimately occupying the White House. Republican lawmakers continue to perpetuate the fiction for political gain. These lawmakers are not stupid. Well, a few are, but most are just cynical, power hungry criminals, willing to take advantage of the gullibility of the average person, using them as pawns in a game they aren’t even a part of, except as soldiers, sacrificial lambs being led to slaughter.
So the question is will compromise and hypocrisy be the American legacy? Will that be the epitaph? Or do you think this is an unhinged diatribe, an overblown partisan rant? You think that’s it?
Oh God I hope so.