The Inconclusive American Experiment
How a country founded on both liberty and slavery set an example to the world
The opening minutes of the 2014 historical drama, Selma, doesn’t pull any of its punches. Introducing us to four Black girls attending church in Alabama on a mid-September day, only to be blown to pieces by a bomb planted by the vicious white supremacist group, the Ku Klux Klan, Selma follows the leaders and participants of the Civil Rights Movement during the leadup to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At the time of the movie’s release, only a few months had passed since the police murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the first wave of the Black Lives Matter protests was under way. Whereas President Obama had been the target of racist epithets throughout his term, these events marked a significant re-entry of the issue of race relations into the white-dominated cultural mainstream. Six years later, the murder of George Floyd catapulted this issue to the very center of “respectable discourse,” with major institutions across the country releasing statements of solidarity with the protesters. In the face of such blatant disregard for not just any human lives in particular, but Black lives, that had remained consistent not just during the COVID pandemic or over the five decades since the Alabama bombings, but for the four centuries since the first arrival of enslaved people on these shores, many in communities of color and progressive circles understandably adopted a pessimistic attitude towards the institution of the United States as a whole, believing that only truly radical change would be sufficient to relieve their oppression.
In the previous part of this series, we explored how the socialist movement came to develop, and how some of its adherents adopted authoritarian tactics that ultimately contributed indirectly to Russia’s war in Ukraine. If you haven’t read that article, I recommend doing so first. Because the United States is always seen as the polar opposite to the Soviet Union, and because of this perspective in which the defining characteristic of the United States is its imperialistic oppressiveness, this article will depart a bit from the topic of social democracy to explore some of the domestic policies and international actions of this country to find the extent to which we bear responsibility for various present injustices around the world, such as the current conflict in Eastern Europe, which Putin blames on NATO expansionism, a claim which we will look more closely at.
White Supremacy in Early America
At the U.S.’s founding, despite the Enlightenment ideals professed by the Framers, only 6% of the population was accorded full civil and political rights; i.e. those who were white, male, and rich enough to own property. In many cases, that “property” represented other human beings; i.e. enslaved African-Americans upon whose labor the economy of the South depended, especially after the invention of the cotton gin. In order to maintain this caste system, it was actually illegal in some states for slave owners to free their slaves, or even do things like teach them to read and write. Although slavery was abolished relatively quickly in the North, they were still more than willing to import Southern cotton to fuel their textile industry. And of course, women were considered property of their husbands, to the point that if she committed a crime, he would be held responsible. This is of course so profoundly dystopian that it’s understandable that many today see the U.S. as having been founded on principles not of equality and progress, but of repression and exploitation. However, despite what conservatives would tell you nowadays, the Framers expected that their experiment would evolve in directions that they couldn’t anticipate, and there were always people who were inspired by the transformative nature of their vision to make an effort to expand its realization to include those who were left out.
This took the form of the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements, which meaningfully emerged in the 1830s and 40’s respectively and, in the case of the former, exerted significant influence in American politics as the rivalry and distrust between the North and the South over the issue of slavery reached a fever pitch. After the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, who had spoken out against slavery but did not explicitly campaign on abolition, Southern leaders became so convinced that the days of slavery were numbered that they were willing to break away from the Union, arguing that that the North had betrayed the values of freedom laid out by the Framers, and founded the Confederate States of America after seven states had issued ordinances of secession (explicitly citing the preservation of slavery as their reason for doing so) and technically existed as independent countries for a brief period. After Southern officers fired on a Northern ship that refused to vacate the harbor at Fort Sumter, the Civil War officially began as Lincoln committed to preventing the Union from being split in two. Although this was originally Lincoln’s primary objective, rather than the abolition of slavery, the latter became the overarching goal of the war when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1st, 1863, which also helped recruit free African-Americans into the army. At this time, Karl Marx was living in New York City, and wrote commending the Union’s effort to squash what he saw as a brutally exploitative capitalist system in the Confederacy. Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to slave states that chose to remain within the Union, the Thirteenth through Fifteenth Amendments were enacted just after Lincoln’s assassination, marking the beginning of the Reconstruction era.
For a brief moment, there was a real possibility for the Southern caste system to be overturned, as the Union military occupied the former Confederacy for several years to smooth the reintegration process. However, just because the Confederates had been defeated on the battlefield did not mean that white Southern elites would be willing to give up what they saw as their way of life. In addition, whereas Lincoln was a member of the Republican Party, he had chosen a Democrat, Andrew Johnson, as his vice president, as an olive branch to the South (since at this time, the Democrats were the pro-slavery party and the Republicans were the abolitionists), so after Lincoln’s assassination by a Confederate sympathizer, the now-President Johnson was receptive to Southern leaders’ complaints about Reconstruction, to the point where Congress’s impeachment attempt against him came within a single vote of success. The real test of the potential of Reconstruction to make a difference, though, came in 1876, the centennial of the country’s foundation, when the presidential election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden came down to a single electoral college vote. Up until a day before the scheduled inauguration, both candidates were still claiming victory, when an agreement was struck that Hayes could become president on the condition that Union troops be withdrawn from the South. At this point, the occupation had ensured that the civil rights of free Black men were respected, and a significant number of them had even been elected for public office in places such as South Carolina, where they made up nearly half of the voting population. But it had also become a costly endeavor for North, where many simply wanted to leave the war in the past. At the moment when the Yankees went home, Southern leaders immediately got to work reimplementing much of the prior racial hierarchy, introducing exorbitant poll taxes and impassable literacy tests required in order to cast a vote, which lower-class whites were able to circumvent via the “grandfather clause,” which said that one could vote if their grandfather had had the right to. Of course, most Black men’s grandfathers had been enslaved, and so virtually all Black participation in Southern civil life was wiped out within a decade, enforced by the infamous state-sponsored terrorist militia, the Ku Klux Klan. Rather than take action that they believed would reinflame divisions, the North stood by and watched as this took place, missing an opportunity to push for equality that would not come again until the Civil Rights Movement eight decades later.
Accelerating Societal Trends
As the Industrial Revolution reached its full swing, working conditions in the factories of the North deteriorated much as they did in Europe, while the owners of these enterprises, referred to variously as “captains of industry” or “robber barons,” accumulated vast quantities of wealth never before seen in American society. Despite this, a decades-long wave of immigration from Europe began, as stories spread of America as a land of opportunity, where anyone could make it if they worked for it, and there was some truth to this, as there was often more social mobility than in many places in the Old World. (It’s estimated that as much as 40% of America’s present-day population, including myself, can trace their heritage back through Ellis Island.) However, it was around this same time that America’s genocide against its Indigenous populations was reaching its full effect, as many of the last unincorporated tracts of land were swept up by white settlers and businesses. In 1906, socialist writer Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a devastating fictionalized account of a Lithuanian family that immigrated to Chicago in search of a better life, only to be ruthlessly exploited by a series of bosses, landlords and city officials, leading the protagonist to eventually turn to the nascent labor movement. In response to this landmark literary project, a public campaign arose to introduce quality standards for the country’s meatpacking industry, as a key plot point of the book focused on the subpar production methods used at the time. Of this unintended consequence, Sinclair remarked, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” However, as the 1910s and 20's unfolded, labor activists were able to win crucial protections, such as the abolition of child labor, leading the period to become known as the Progressive Era.
Because the First World War did not have a clear-cut “good side” and “bad side” in the same way that the second did, I won’t focus on the U.S.’s involvement in it here. However, being on the winning side was of course beneficial for the economy, paving the way for the “Roaring 20’s,” defined by flappers performing to jazz music in art-deco speakeasies, after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment extending the franchise to women. Of course, this came to an end when the Great Depression spiraled out of a sudden 1929 Wall Street stock market crash, leading to the first instance of America’s industrial powerhouse actually losing productivity. Millions of people were immiserated, and an atmosphere of malaise took hold, especially in rural areas affected by the Dust Bowl, a natural disaster that ruined the crop outputs of several states. However, unlike their German counterparts, the voters of the United States did not turn to fascism to relieve their hardships. Just two days after the Nazis won a plurality in the 1932 German parliamentary elections, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected on a platform of redistributive governmental interventions to revive the economy and pull the American people out of the pit, in contrast with his predecessor, President Hoover, who had instead opted to carry out a mass deportation of immigrants and citizens of Mexican heritage. Of course, business interests were appalled at FDR’s plans, and reportedly considered staging a coup to install a fascist general, Smedley Butler, as president, but thankfully this never came to fruition. Over the following years, his New Deal programs created what represented the first social safety net in America’s history, ensuring that many of those who were unfortunate enough to find themselves at the bottom of society could still have their basic needs met. In order to finance this, what would today be considered exorbitant income taxes were levied on the rich, climbing as high as 90% during the Second World War. As America fought fascism abroad, kicking its economy into high gear in the process, it gradually became a place where, once again, average people had the chance to succeed.
Of course, African-Americans and other minorities missed out on much of this recovery, and citizens of Japanese heritage were preemptively treated as traitors. Indeed, Langston Hughes famously wrote in 1943,
“You tell me that hitler / Is a mighty bad man / I guess he took lessons from the ku klux klan […] I ask you this question / Cause I want to know / How long I got to fight / BOTH HITLER — AND JIM CROW.”
As it turns out, Hitler had taken inspiration from Jim Crow and America’s treatment of the Indians, and was attempting to emulate it to a more extreme degree against the Jewish, Slavic and Romani people of Europe. And as mentioned in the previous article, despite the U.S.’s signature of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, many remained staunchly opposed to its core principles of equality and dignity. While the U.S. provided significant aid to help the war-ravaged nations of Western Europe rebuild through the Marshall Plan, some argue that this was motivated not by charity but by a desire to prevent their populations from turning to communism (while the Soviet-led bloc forewent this aid due to the capitalist nature of its provenance). As the rapid suburbanization of the 50s got underway, a new division emerged in American society, as middle-class white families moved out of the cities en masse, leaving behind those who weren’t welcome in Levittown.
The Civil Rights Movement
In the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court found segregation within public schools on the basis of race to be unconstitutional, contradicting the previous doctrine of “separate but equal” that had in practice usually meant “separate and unequal.” This is often cited as the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, as Black leaders and activists organized a nationwide campaign to demand equal treatment under the law, the end of segregation, and the restoration of the right to vote as guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment. As this movement gained steam, its prominent figures embraced a strategy of peaceful protest to exert pressure on the existing system to change (inspired by the success of Mahatma Gandhi’s independence campaign against the British), led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. At the same time, a parallel movement emerged, which believed in the necessity of a revolution to bring down the existing system in its entirety, led by Malcolm X. In the latter’s view, it was actually better for Blacks and whites to live separately, as long as such an environment existed in which Black people could live autonomously and unfettered by racism, which could take the form of an independent country established in the South.
From 1952 to 1964, Malcolm X was the public spokesperson for the Nation of Islam, a pseudo-religious nationalist organization that preached that all people of color were descended from the Tribe of Shabazz, created by Allah around 66 trillion years ago, when one day a scientist named Yakub created the demonic white race, which then ruled the world for 6,000 years, but the year 1914 marked the beginning of the end of this period, as the organization’s founder, Wallace Fard Muhammad, will soon return from the dead and establish a Black-only utopia. (Needless to say, the Muslim world does not recognize this as a legitimate variation of their religion.) The Nation of Islam did not allow its followers to participate in the political process, in stark contrast with the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, who sought to use every legal tool at their disposal. Malcolm X also saw Dr. King’s strategy of nonviolence as “the philosophy of the fool,” and accused leaders of the Civil Rights Movement of being “stooges” of the White establishment. Malcolm X panned the famous March on Washington and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, describing the march as being “run by whites in front of a statue of a president who has been dead for a hundred years and who didn’t like us when he was alive” and continued, “while King was having a dream, the rest of us Negroes are having a nightmare.” Despite President Kennedy’s support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Malcolm X accused him of playing a political game with African-Americans’ future, since the Democratic Party still contained within it both the relatively newly emerged progressive wing to which FDR and Kennedy belonged, and the racist “Dixiecrats” from the South, the latter of whom had promised to sink the bill. Therefore, in response to Kennedy’s assassination, Malcolm X commented that “chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.”
However, Malcolm X did moderate his approach somewhat not long after, expressing willingness to put aside his differences with the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, and embraced voting as a legitimate means to bring about change, while of course still leaving the option for violence open if the Civil Rights Act of 1964 failed to pass. For his part, Dr. King preferred a more optimistic approach, painting a picture of an arc of history that bent towards justice, but only if people were brave enough to pull it in that direction, not unlike the vision laid out by Marx (discussed in the previous article). King did understand where Malcolm X was coming from, but was not particularly fond of his rhetoric:
I totally disagree with many of his political and philosophical views, as I understand them. He is very articulate, as you say. I don’t want to seem to sound as if I feel so self-righteous, or absolutist, that I think I have the only truth, the only way. Maybe he does have some of the answer. But I know that I have so often felt that I wished that he would talk less of violence, because I don’t think that violence can solve our problem. And in his litany of expressing the despair of the Negro, without offering a positive, creative approach, I think that he falls into a rut sometimes.
Nixon & Reagan
As the United States entered the Vietnam War in a misguided attempt to curb Soviet influence, much of this faction of the left voiced their solidarity with the North Vietnamese and more broadly with the Soviet Union, Cuba and those who had faced American antagonism, often via the CIA, for their adherence to socialism. This war proved enormously unpopular among the American people, as nightly TV reporting from the front lines accompanied stories of drafted soldiers coming back physically and emotionally wrecked. This overshadowed the accomplishments of President Lyndon B. Johnson, such as the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (which led the Dixiecrats to begin to abandon the Democratic Party entirely), as well as his Great Society programs that were launched with the intention to essentially eliminate poverty and racial inequality, as a follow-up to FDR’s New Deal. Knowing the potency of the war as an election issue, Republican candidate Richard Nixon sabotaged the peace talks facilitated by the Johnson administration by secretly encouraging the South Vietnamese to hold out until after the election before accepting any ceasefires. The Nixon administration also initiated the infamous War on Drugs, in which Schedule-I substances were often deliberately planted by law enforcement in African-American communities in what can be seen as a premeditated attempt to disenfranchise and strip of dignity an entire community. A Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, later admitted the real motivation behind this action:
You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
The Vietnam War, of course, continued throughout Nixon’s entire first term in office, in spite of Nixon’s over-the-phone remarks to the Apollo 11 astronauts in recognition of NASA’s amazing accomplishment of sending people to the moon:
As you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to Earth. For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one: one in their pride in what you have done, and one in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth. (emphasis mine)
In response to the perception that some had of the government as being more interested in showing off to the rest of the world (with an all-white-male team of astronauts) than actually addressing the needs of disadvantaged people at home, Black musician Gil Scott-Heron released a spoken-word poem commenting on this interplanetary disparity, especially as the post-WW2 economic boom wore off:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey’s on the moon)
I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be paying still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon)[…]
Y’know I just about had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I’ll send these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)
American troops finally withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, leading to the North taking over the South two years later and establishing a socialist republic that continues to this day, around the same time when the Khmer Rouge regime established itself in Cambodia, which, along with neighboring Laos, had also been extensively bombed in an attempt to cut off the supply lines of the Vietnamese. This bombing campaign, personally encouraged by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, took an enormous toll on peasants living in the countryside, many of whom joined just the communist movements that the U.S. hoped to quash. In light of this, members of the anti-American left, such as well-known linguist Noam Chomsky, became willing to defend the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, despite the atrocities carried out by it, discussed in the previous article:
We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered … When they speak of ‘the murder of a gentle land,’ they are not referring to B-52 attacks on villages or the systematic bombing and murderous ground sweeps by American troops or forces organized and supplied by the United States, in a land that had been largely removed from the conflict [in Vietnam] prior to the American attack.
As devastating as Kissinger’s bombing campaign had been, it’s important to note that the United States didn’t make the Khmer Rouge commit genocide against their own people. To argue that their actions between 1975 and 1979 were somehow the predestined result of having been bombed by the U.S., and therefore not their own fault, would be to fundamentally rob colonized people of their agency, to the extent that Chomsky admits that these crimes against humanity even happened, before deflecting with what is essentially whataboutism. And of course, it neglects the instances of actual clandestine support for these regimes from Washington, undercutting the idea that these atrocities somehow represented a reaction to American imperialism.
After the American-backed monarchy of Iran was overthrown by an Islamic revolution, a group of diplomats and civilians were held hostage in the embassy in Tehran for more than a year. As the Democratic president Jimmy Carter attempted to negotiate for their release, his Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan, like Nixon before him, secretly pressured the Iranian authorities to hold out until after the election before accepting any deals. The Reagan administration initially took a harder line towards the Soviet Union than their predecessors, famously referring to them as an “evil empire,” elevating tensions significantly. During the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA funded Islamist militias in the countryside, known as the mujahideen, who contributed to the Soviets’ eventual retreat. At home, Reagan had campaigned on a series of rollbacks of the New Deal’s social safety net provisions, neatly framing this in the campaign slogan “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,’” alluding to the perception of Soviet social programs as coming at a cost to individual freedoms. At the same time, Reagan pursued what became known as the Southern Strategy to win over former Democratic voters who had been disenchanted by that party’s turn towards the left. A Reagan campaign consultant, Lee Atwater, admitted in an interview the logic underlying this outreach effort:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N***er, n***er, n***er.” By 1968 you can’t say “n***er” — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites … “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N***er, n***er.” (emphasis mine)
Reagan also abandoned Carter’s commitments to shift to renewable energy away from fossil fuels, and pushed through a series of deregulatory policies that led to a significant drop in unionization rates, which had been high ever since the Great Depression. However, Reagan was willing to work constructively with Gorbachev, famously calling on him to “tear down” the Berlin Wall, and welcoming many of his demokratizatsiya reforms, as discussed in the previous article. After the Soviet Union dissolved, the U.S. felt emboldened to pursue more significant foreign interventions even without U.N. Security Council approval, such as the NATO bombing of Serbian forces during the dissolution of Yugoslavia in order to protect the Bosniak people from genocide, an action that remains controversial to this day. In what has manifested as an enormous concession to the conservative right, the administration of Democratic president Bill Clinton largely accepted the new political consensus established by Reagan, declaring in his 1996 State of the Union address that “the era of big government is over.” However, if one saw the U.S.’s actions during the 20th century as dastardly, what would follow in the 21st would make it pale in comparison.
The Ambivalent 21st Century
After the Supreme Court controversially decided the razor-thin 2000 election in favor of George Bush II, the new president responded to the September 11th al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City by unleashing a series of vengeful regime change operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, while largely leaving Saudi Arabia alone, despite the fact that the plane hijackers were Saudi citizens, inspired by that country’s state-sponsored fundamentalist ideology of Wahhabism, which later went on to inspire the Islamic State. Although the Taliban, a group of former mujahideen that had taken over most of Afghanistan in the Soviets’ absence, offered to extradite the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, to a neutral third country, the Bush administration turned this down. At the same time, it’s difficult to deny that living standards improved in the Taliban’s absence, especially when it came to the treatment of women, who were once again permitted to leave their homes and receive a proper education. However, as the Bush administration’s fabricated narrative that the Iraqi government was developing weapons of mass destruction gradually unraveled, and as the civilian death toll of the Iraq War spiraled into the hundreds of thousands, America justifiably took a deep hit to its credibility and standing on the international stage, which has yet to recover two decades later. These events have since been pointed to by leftists as incontrovertible evidence of the U.S.’s incorrigible nature as a violent, extractive empire, given the profit incentives for the oil industry and the military-industrial complex from both of these wars.
As Bush’s term came to a close, the banking industry inflicted an unnecessary recession on the American people by providing millions of housing loans to people whom they knew would be unable to pay up, in the aftermath of which, the bank CEOs were bailed out on taxpayer dollars while those millions of people were left in debt. These events served as potent radicalization fuel that led to both the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left and the Tea Party on the right as the first African-American president, Barack Obama, initially struggled to manage the fallout without a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, as it was around this time that the two major political parties had fully realized the potential of the filibuster to obstruct their opponents’ agendas. Obama was elected on a wave of hope for progressive change, and he was able to deliver many of his promises, such as the Affordable Care Act and the withdrawal from Iraq, but many saw him as being too similar to Clinton in his willingness to fruitlessly pursue bipartisanship with a Republican Party that was by this point openly committed to sabotaging his administration, fueled by Fox News vitriol and Donald Trump’s birtherist conspiracy theories. He was also willing to utilize drone strikes with high civilian casualties in order to take out supposed terrorist threats, which of course only contributed to their recruitment efforts. In addition, the Supreme Court essentially struck down the Voting Rights Act of 1965, prompting an immediate wave of voter suppression measures designed to take advantage of legal loopholes to disenfranchise communities of color, and also essentially legalized bribery of politicians by special interests by removing limits on campaign donations. Ultimately, a lack of enthusiasm for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, whose potential presidency many saw as effectively a third Obama term, combined with seething resentment from rural white voters at being left behind by globalization in the wake of the 2008 recession and at the election of a Black president, led to the election of the proto-fascist Trump in 2016 (with the help of Vladimir Putin), whose promise to restore American greatness did not involve reviving any New Deal social programs, but merely the racial hierarchy of the 1950s.
If you’ve read this far, you probably follow politics closely enough that I don’t have to fill you in on what happened next, so let’s take another moment to step back and review what we’ve just seen. Founded on the Enlightenment principles of the 18th century, America’s history has been defined by the valiant efforts made by some to push this country to more faithfully realize its professed ideals. Has the United States on many occasions embodied the height of bigotry and exploitation? Absolutely, but I don’t see why that side of the U.S. should be said to represent its true face any more than its numerous activists and movements that have fought for social justice.
However, in an environment where living standards for many have not recovered from the 2008 recession; where Pentagon spending often supersedes any other consideration, such as revitalizing underserved communities; and where Democratic politicians often appear content to simply be less bad than the Republicans, one of the few things on which it seems that both sides can agree is that our government has failed and is failing to provide for the needs of its citizens. For those on the right, especially in rural predominantly-white areas, this realization comes in the absence of an understanding of the actual root causes of their hardships, leading them to blame immigrants, Black people, drag queens, or anyone under the sun besides the billionaire oligarchs and the politicians who funnel America’s savings into their bank accounts. This misunderstanding is not their fault, seeing as these are the narratives constantly pumped at them by Fox News, whose screeching about socialism has reached such heights that it could reasonably be referred to as the third Red Scare. On the other hand, for those on the left, especially in urban communities of color, the combination of the factors listed above, in addition to the widening overrepresentation of rural whites from the Senate to the Supreme Court, can contribute to a sense of defeatism, in which the kind of change necessary to address the root causes of people’s suffering is simply not possible within the current political system, which could never realistically be reformed enough to do so. It is not necessarily clear what the proper next step would then be, with the exception of a revolution, which does not appear to be within the realm of possibility at this moment, (although that could change in the event of widespread chaos surrounding the 2024 election). However, as much as I sympathize with these concerns, it is difficult for me to get on board with the idea that institutions cannot fundamentally change from the principles upon which they were founded, which, in the case of the United States, as we’ve seen, are themselves the subject of disagreement between the left and the right. Indeed, even as Martin Luther King understood the frustrations of the faction led by Malcolm X, he didn’t give up on the possibility that America could change naturally to more faithfully embody the principle that all people are created equal.
It’s also important to remember that the polarized environment in which we find ourselves today is only partially the result of organic domestic trends, and was also deliberately stirred up by Putin’s destabilization campaign to diminish America’s standing as a world-leading power. Putin’s motivation for doing this was in retaliation for what he perceived as a diminution in Russian standing perpetrated by the U.S., in the form of the expansion of NATO and the E.U. into Eastern Europe in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He believed that if he could get the United States out of the way, his annexation of Crimea and ultimately the rest of Ukraine would go unopposed by the international community, and he might’ve been right had he decided to go through with the latter during Trump’s presidency. However, whereas Putin claims that President Bush I had promised Secretary Gorbachev that the U.S. would not push to expand NATO, diplomatic aides of Bush in addition to Gorbachev himself have declared this to be untrue. In addition, this narrative that the expansion of NATO represented an unjustified act of aggression disregards the very real reasons why the people of Eastern Europe would want a guarantee of protection against their former Russian occupiers. Furthermore, as long as the Crimea issue existed, there was no chance for Ukraine itself to join the alliance, as NATO does not allow applicant countries to draw them into regional territorial disputes. The only extent to which the United States bears fault for the war in Ukraine is its lack of initiative during the 90’s after the fall of the Soviet Union to help rebuild its former member countries (in the same vein as the Marshall Plan), which contributed to a collapse of living conditions in Russia and to Putin’s subsequent rise.
At this point, in order to better understand not only the circumstances leading to Trump’s election but also the evolution of the rhetoric used by progressives, we have to look at the role of the internet and social media, as it is there that the authoritarian left has gradually asserted its presence and repeated many of the same mistakes as their 20th century counterparts, as discussed in the previous article. Tune back in hopefully some time in the next few months for the next part of this series, which will explore this issue in detail. I will leave off on a note that has been sung across the decades by those fighting to make America a better place to live for all:
We shall overcome!
