History: The Spyglass of Politics
History allows its observers to put ideas into motion, to see patterns; to discover and track how ideas adapt and change for different purposes and new environments. You cannot talk about Donald Trump’s high poll numbers without understanding his success with his reality show, “The Apprentice.” To view him purely as a political phenomena does voters a disservice.
But media professionals and policy experts take the opposite approach: too often their analysis holds things static. They miss the motivation and deep strength the ideas have historically enfolded — they missed it in Trump’s case in his remarks about Mexicans and how they were received; they missed in Ben Carson’s case, too. The left dismissed the remarks as typical of racists and those willing to banish their ignorance or bias. But dig deeper: what do these remarks tell us about American society, its goals of freedom and self-governance? How, without history, can we gauge the depth of the intractable ideals in people’s hearts?
Why should we know? Because not knowing is like rebuilding in a flood zone after storm. Unless we look to discover the deeper causes, the worsening consequences, our economic success and way of life can be swept away — as quickly as homes toppled into the sea.
From history, we can explore the many influences that shape ideas and how ideas follow new paths.
So, is Tea Party extremism new? Or is it dysfunctionalism? Are its roots in the icon of Ronald Reagan? Or Strom Thurmond, and his Senate and governor predecessors, Cole Blease, Cotton Ed Smith, Pitchfork Ben Tillman? Blease buried the finger of a lynched man in the governor’s garden at the mansion; Smith hated Negroes and Roosevelt’s New Deal; in 1900, Tillman spoke this manifesto from the Senate’s floor:
We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will.
Is the tea party just politics as usual, sometimes opaquely referenced as a reason not to worry. Are we witnessing the beginnings of a idiotic, “banana republic,” tallied by Republican hardliner Peter King?
Is media adding clarity or greater confusion?
The real story — all its dimensions — is being hidden, but not my conspiracies, but by corporate functions. In the coming hours, media reporters and pundits will receive more air time than the debate candidates, telling us over and over what we heard and saw. We heard it unfiltered with our own ears. Yet we cannot call the media troubadours on their errors and lies. Their colleagues never challenge them; their images and words on tape, the candidates are unable to reply.
Debates are rigged for the media’s minstrels. They are cocooned, protected, and infallible no matter which edition you watch. They are expected to add context and history, comparative examples; to point out fallacies, straw arguments, and false causes. With their own implied complicity, their well-paid jobs have been reduced to serving mega-corporate interests.
Bernie Sanders opposes those interests and they are wary, as are their bosses. The expensive fees we pay for nightly repeats might be cut; corporate advertising is falling. Media pundits can talk on their feet, but not think on their feet. Their pre-determined talking points are as obvious as are the candidates!
Fitting that Las Vegas was the background for the debate. A fast town, with raising fortunes and big dreams, beckoning to followers and believers — not of candidates — but media! Once a fight town, now a debate town with distractions, legal gambling and all night buffets.
After the debate, I turned off the cable (nothing on air!). Tell me: Did I miss anything?
To the point, has the GOP has become prisoner to its own “bombastic” ideas, as New York Times David Brooks argues in his Monday column — or is the party hostage to its own overwrought measures and conflicts, resurfacing in its history?
To support his point, Brooks does a fade more seductive and illusive than the Cheshire cat’s. In the great hall of political dialogue, he dissolves the culprits, proud and clear, live and breathing, foul and ugly, into a miasma of conceptions and mangled ideas spoiled when the slow cooker broke down their substance, as if we were all caught unaware by their extremes.
Brooks should know it wasn’t the stew that burned itself: It was the cooks! By deliberate design! By every score and observation (go back, review the tape!), the heat was turned up by folk whose well intent (or ill intent) was to burn the sauce that nourishes our common life — its roads and bridges, its schools and parks, everything but its guns! — and make its nurture uneatable, killing program after program — and then deciding, with a Paul Bunyan giant stroke (Nero wailing in the house band!) to strike down the structure of government itself! Their choice, their words. Their deeds, following their own leads. Make no mistake! Their actions can not be blamed on their ideas!
From Aristotle on, action has been about reality, not ideas. Is reality a single dimension, or multiple dimensions? New dimensions add new combinations, new layers of disguise and angst, new curses and forms of blame. And new paths to progress!
The media put forth realities in one dimension. Winners, losers; strong weak; up or down. Present actions only have one outcome, policies, one reason. Look past their lists of single outputs to the process: in politics the layers of silence are as important as the noise, and the silence and noise work together to produce the con.
Returning to Aristotle, he cited as key dimensions, essence and appearance — today in politics they form a relationship that is all form and no content. Paul Ryan, for one, has the appearance of deep thought simply because he doesn’t shout. He offers the appearance of solutions; he stays outside of the noise.
Whereas the Tea Party extremists want to take down the structure of government, Ryan wants to use the structure to dismantle it from within.
Others think that democracy and capitalism stand for fair play and mutual benefits in these exchanges, but democracy and capitalism help form an American political economy that allows for non-beneficial, one-sided exchanges–public and private — enabling specific partners to dictate the exchange. (The way experts reports say the 1.7-second shooting of 12-year old Tamir Rice of Cleveland without warning was “reasonable”and “”justified.” )
From Ferguson, MO with its yearly escalating police revenue scams–arbitrary tickets, increases without a schedule, fines for offenses that included “manner of walking,” to a hedge fund that buys a drug company and without warning, raises the price per pill from $13.50 to $750 overnight, the market has been void of justice and democracy has forsaken the people’s power.
Thinking historically, many actions and ideas gave weight to the presence of divisions by race in American society. Follow their history, their tracks reveal how and why these fissures are sustained through time. Historically, it’s easy to spot the passage towers among the laws, mob actions, legal covenants, popular journalism, and Senate floor speeches, all loaded with highly charged defamatory racial epithets and stereotypes, and even calls for death and lynchings (by South Carolina former governor and US Senator Cole Blease, among them).
Often organized, occasionally spontaneous; history offers a long list of statements and actions that kept with the cultural ideas, myths and practices of inferiority to prevent others from meeting common standards. History spotlights formal groups (White Citizens Councils) that denied their racist intent while recycling the buzz words that replaced direct racial slurs. During elections, new buzz words turned into new forms of action (symbolically lynching empty chairs in President Obama’s election run in 2012!)
To explain the presence racial bias by “differences” in voter attitudes erases the long journey of race baiting and its many historic forms; it ignores its continuity and continuous presence–but does such race biting and racial bias and its animus of hate challenge democracy? Does it belong in a capitalist society? Is the triangle of race, equality, and freedom fair and inclusive — or expected to be?
The American writer Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of the novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” ) said in her letters, articles, and public remarks, many didn’t think so–gauging by comments made to her after “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” her landmark work about American slavery, was published in 1852. She was horrified that so many found slavery, anti-black bias and stereotyping compatible with the high ideals of democracy and slavery with the fair practices of trade .
Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court Roger Taney addressed the question directly and decided that American democracy was only possible and could only be fully expressed if it were anti-black. He created the sustaining asymmetries of race and democracy, equality and freedom, in his decision (a written opinion for the court’s majority!) regarding freedom for the enslaved Dred Scott.
Under Articles III and IV, argued Taney, no one but a citizen of the United States could be a citizen of a state, and that only Congress could confer national citizenship. Taney reached the conclusion that no person descended from an American slave had ever been a citizen for Article III purposes.
In his high court opinion, Taney firmly lays out the idea that the equality implied by democracy clearly curtails freedom if applied to race.
That decision is one of the historic sources of the conflict between freedom vs. equality and how it plays out in big government vs. small government. Taney established white superiority by creating black inferiority — its conditions ordained by God and law. Taney’s words of labyrinth are easily removed from slavery and transported through time to Ronald Reagan,with a little refit, they drive the noise and silence of America’s attitudes of race today.
The Herculean task of Bernie Sanders, to change the political economy of America’s liberal economy, while opening some doors, also still consigns to the margins those with different color skins. This single focus and marginalization also belies the importance of race, in dialogue and action, throughout the nation’s history. Income inequality is huge, globally! But this tamping down of race makes it easy for the candidates to use race to cast blame small and large, and for media and pundits to jump over the facts.
Why jump over history, esp. one rife with conflicts, the substance media seeks? Conflicts are often appearances, surface fights (the idea the two parties are the same!) — a media specialty!
A contradiction, on the other hand, is a clash that transforms the situations/persons/ideas into a different substance or essence. College once transformed working class students by exposing them to higher education; instead of failing, they were transformed and could seek greater security and better pay. Than the political economy became the gig economy. A New Jersey mother died one winter, dying from carbon dioxide poisoning in her sleep, her car running, as she tried to nap before her next shift.
If you are Republican and conservative: wouldn’t it make sense to set aside the continual attacks on safety net programs? Could not trust and demonstrated effectiveness be gained by creating incentives and going after systemic fraud and waste?
If you are Republican and conservative: wouldn’t it make sense to innovate ways and means to build peace while reducing the Defense budget by cutting unwanted engines, weapon systems while recognizing wars are being fought within countries and resisted by international coalitions (Nigeria, the Congo, Syria, Afghanistan, et. al) rather than between countries with national standing armies?
If you are Republican and conservative, rathering than reading Doctor Seuss on tax players time, shouldn’t you hold town hall meetings with the voters in your district with pre-existing conditions, with hospitals whose emergency rooms are overrun, and stop ignoring the US has the highest costs and highest percentage of uninsured among North Atlantic nations?
If you are Republican and conservative, isn’t it time to recognize workers have a real partnership in the economy, and re-center your policy on families rather than the wealth of balance sheets.
Isn’t it time you created jobs now for today’s youth, and quit lamenting the condition of unborn grandchildren?
And support free speech! Not marketplace speech produced, looped, published as headlines, or as 90-second video.
Republicans, conservatives, isn’t it time for truth and common sense.
Looking through history, we find abundant evidence that contradiction is a key to Barack’s story; a black man beat the odds when the GOP thought they had a straw man, an easy target — but his weaknesses — real and imagined — became part of his strengths through his management and insight.
His pacifism saved lives, through realizing the folly of a “strong military.” He took unpopular causes and advanced them through a Supreme Court whose conservatives believed in the Constitution more than ideology (except in Citizens United and a few other cases), seeing in conservative principles a pathway to intra-gender marriage. He used the Republican sequester to cut the military budget. He waited until he was a “lame duck” to open relations with Cuba! He changed the landscape of the Americas after 50 years.
All of these are examples of contradictions used as transformative devices, as the GOP circled in conflict over the same old things into the same old dead ends. And pull your spyglasses out: they are trying to do it once again!
Republicans seem condemned to repeat the debunked history that shapes their ideas and summons their actions. In the name of heritage, again, and greatness, they never once look back to see that their way forward is a path that every other nation on earth has consigned to history’s dust tracks, in order to pursue peace and global progress.
