Mark Charles for President. Seriously.
Let’s begin with some true or false questions.
America is a Christian Nation. T/F
America is the greatest nation on earth. T/F
Racial socioeconomic and health disparities are a result of failure of personal responsibility. T/F
Capitalism is morally superior to other economic systems. T/F
Just like that we can isolate political preferences.
Answer mostly false? Hi, Democrat.
Answer mostly true? Hi, Republican.
Our partisanship is so predictable because we don’t have a common memory.
The answer to the question “who are we?” is muddled and confused. Ask different communities, get different answers.
There are two guiding questions to every political moment. First, who is “in?” Second, how do those that are “in” live well together?
Who is in? If you live in the United States — barring a second civil war — you are stuck with who you’ve got whether you like them or not.
How do we live well together? Step one is a collective, shared memory. We can’t live well together if we don’t share a common memory, common values, or a common identity.
But we can only move forward by being honest about how we got here.
The bottom line is that we have short political memories. Most of us don’t know much about politics in the United States before we were teenagers or young adults. Functionally, from Harry S. Truman on back we are — as a nation — clueless until we get to Thomas Jefferson, with the exception of Lincoln.
Without a long view of our history our electoral politics has become— as you well know — increasingly reactionary, on both sides. It is more out of hand day by day, tweet by tweet.
We don’t know America as well as we think. We don’t know Lincoln as well as we think.
Etched in stone at the Lincoln Memorial is Lincoln’s bottom-line opinion on the question of chattel slavery:
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
As it happens, the largest mass execution in American history happened under Honest Abe — whose administration oversaw 38 Sioux men publicly executed in Mankato, Minnesota. This preceded the legal exclusion of all Dakota Sioux from Minnesota. The federal government, through the US army positioned in Minnesota, recruited and paid up to $200 for finding and killing any Dakota man who refused to, or had not yet, left their long-time homes.
The namesake of my elementary School — Patrick Henry — is famous for declaring the famous binary of liberty or death. Yet, at his death he enslaved 112 men, women, and children. Rather than freeing them willed them to his family.
My son’s elementary school’s namesake — Thomas Jefferson — enslaved a woman of African descent as a concubine.
There is a set of the American population — if they have read this far — who would dismiss all of this as #FakeNews.
The problem is that today the facts of history are partisan.
Talking about America is virtually impossible without taking sides in a political war.
Yes, Christopher Columbus was a terrible human being who committed atrocities.
Yes, Lincoln preserved the union, but he also gave full throated support to Native genocide.
Yes, the federal government hired white settlers to hunt and kill men.
Yes, the constitution was written by white, land-owning men — to serve their own interests and their own purposes.
These are the facts. We need to talk about them.
You might be thinking, what does this have to do with Joe Biden or Donald Trump?
No other candidate is ready to lead us through the steps necessary to resolve our nation’s political chaos.
What Mark Charles offers is a dialogue, an honest conversation about race, class, and gender this country has never had. What he promises — if we listen, participate, and join — is an America for #AllThePeople.
Imagine that instead of partisanship there was a president that — like you — was exhausted with compromising with Republicans for the sake of abortion.
Imagine that instead of partisanship there was a president that — like you — was frustrated with Democrats disregarding justice for the sake of power, even as they claim to the be the party of justice.
Imagine voting for a president and knowing that — even though either Joe Biden or Donald Trump is almost certainly going to end up in the White House — you voted for a stronger, more secure America.
What changed my mind was a commitment to the long view. Mark Charles’ vision is not for 2020 or 2024, it is starting from the beginning and working for as long as it takes until we are a nation that is truly for #AllThePeople.
“But abortion?”
We do not have a pro-life party in the United States. One of the parties is pro-choice, and one is anti-abortion.
Mark Charles’ pro-life commitment is to ensure every child receives the nutrition and education and safe housing they deserve, while their mothers and fathers are provided with the child care and paternal leave they need. More importantly, his long view re-imagines our economic systems so that women’s careers are not punished for becoming mothers.
The battle over abortion won’t be won or lost in the courts, it will be won or lost when we as a nation decide that — as a nation — we value life. America did not value the lives of women, Natives, or people of African descent in 1776. America did not value the lives of North Vietnamese during the Second Indochina War. And today America does not value the lives of the children, the sojourner, or — as recent policy decisions indicate — our geopolitical allies.
We can vote, hoping desperately that a future pro-life judge will help overturn Roe v Wade. Or we can vote to slow down, take a few steps back, and decide we need to re-examine who we are as a country. In order to forge a shared pro-life ethic we need to confront the trauma of our white supremacist, genocidal past. Only then can we move forward and find a pro-life ethic that protects #AllThePeople.
