Category: Conservativism

THE GOP’S NEW BIG LIE: SYSTEMIC RACISM DOESN’T EXIST

Just as Republicans pulled the plug on investigating the deadly January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, many of us were learning – for the first time in 100 years – of something called the Tulsa Race Massacre. It seems that the long and winding road from 1921 to 2021 is paved with deception.

A large Black community just outside of Tulsa was decimated by white Oklahomans in 1921.  Some 300 Black men, women and children were murdered, thousands of homes were burned to the ground. Black businesses, schools and churches were destroyed. 

As the great white fathers of Tulsa surveyed the ashes of their destruction, the obvious question was how to weigh, measure and record this brutal massacre so that future generations could learn from it.  Their answer: Fuhgeddaboudit!  They covered it up, claimed it was just another riot by uppity Blacks. The newspapers didn’t touch the real story and neither did the history textbooks.

The Tulsa Race Massacre, it turns out, was not unique to early 20th Century America. Similar atrocities of white mobs killing hundreds of Black people played out in Atlanta; East St. Louis; Chicago; Knoxville; Omaha; Chester, Pa.; Longview, Texas; Elaine, Ark.; Wilmington, Del.; and Washington, D.C., among numerous other cities. In each case, this murderous, torturous behavior of white citizens was treated as a deep, dark family secret. It took historians almost a century to extract and piece together these long-hidden truths.  

Nearly a hundred years later, our nation’s capitol was invaded by an angry white supremacist  mob of gun-toting, confederate flag-waving rebels, hell bent on stopping Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the country’s duly elected president. Five people died and more than 100 police officers were injured. What sayeth the great white fathers of the GOP on the matter of thoroughly investigating this treasonous incursion so that we never encounter a sequel?  Their answer came directly from the script of their Tulsa forefathers: Fuhgeddaboudit!  Best to just move on and pretend it didn’t happen. Again.

Here’s a truth that passed the test of time with flying colors:  “The more things change,” wrote French author Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in 1849, “the more they stay the same.” Our world has changed in profound ways since 1921. We have Wi-Fi, Tesla and Zoom. We use words like “ideation” and “reimagine.”  We take conference calls where we “circle back” and “unpack.”  But when it comes to the politics of race, white conservatives still bury the truth and lie through their teeth like it was 1921.

And there is no bigger lie than this one:  Systemic racism doesn’t exist.  Former Vice President Mike Pence says it’s a “left-wing myth.”  South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham says there is no systemic racism in America, only a few “bad actors.” Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton insists there is no sign of systemic racism in our country.  Then there’s the multi-tasking Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves who, on a single Fox News appearance, denied the existence of systemic racism and proclaimed April as Confederate Heritage Month. 

The same conservative crowd that pushed red states to make it harder for Black people to vote (based on the fabrication of rampant voter fraud), are now advocating legislation that would prohibit public schools from teaching about the way race influences politics, culture and the law. The bills are aimed at keeping students away from any notion of systemic racism. Such laws would forbid teaching about race, racism and white supremacy. Some measures go so far as to prohibit public universities from requiring diversity training.

Another key component of this legislative package requires teachers dealing with ugly historical episodes, or current racial controversies, to explore all sides of the issues “without giving deference to any one perspective.”  Can you imagine a lesson plan outlining the pros and cons of lynching, or the murder of hundreds of Back people?

The insipid irony in all of this is that a legislative coverup of past and present racial oppression is, in itself, a form of the very systemic racism these Republican lawmakers swear does not exist. For better or worse, laws create systems. The system these head-in-the-sand legislators want is one where we pretend there is no racism, and that Blacks are on an equal footing with whites. And that the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 never happened.

The truth is that it is hard to find a system in this country that is not racially skewed to the detriment of Black people. Take, for example, our systems of education, home ownership and its redlining roots,  employment, wealth accumulation and medical care.  Although occasionally adjusted in response to issues of racial inequity, they all retain the same DNA that created them back in the days of slavery and Jim Crow. 

Here’s where those systems have taken us:  

  • Median net wealth:  White families: $188,200. Black families: $24,100.
  • Median net wealth for people between the ages of 25 and 40: White: $41,800. Black: $3,500.
  • Home ownership: 73.7 percent of whites own homes. 56 percent of Blacks do.
  • Health insurance: Although Blacks make up 13.4 percent of the population, they account for half of the 30 million Americans who have no insurance.
  • Education:  Predominately Black public schools receive $2,226 less in per-pupil government aid than predominately white schools.  

From a purely empirical perspective, systemic racism is as real as it gets. The far tougher question is how to dismantle a malignancy on our country’s soul that has been there for . . . well, forever? The only place to start is with the truth, no easy task in an environment where disinformation reigns supreme. Folks who believe that Donald Trump will be “reinstated” as president in August, are only too willing to accept the notion that America is a racist-free country.  

Only a powerful and aggressive countermovement – by Democrats, non-Trumpian Republicans, independents, progressives, Green Party members and socialists – can deliver us from the diabolical illusions that are now the cornerstone of conservatism. Let’s start by stopping state legislatures from banning classroom discussion about the evils of racism.

Whitewashing the ugliness – past and present – only begets more ugliness.  

WILL A POST-TRUMP GOP RETURN TO ACTUAL BELIEFS & VALUES?

Here’s a history question to kick off our quadrennial political party conventions: Name the candidate whose nomination acceptance speech contained these five sentences:

  • “Everyone, from immigrant to entrepreneur, has an equal claim on this country’s promise.”
  • “Bigotry disfigures the heart.”
  • “Corporations are responsible to treat their workers fairly and to leave the air and waters clean.”
  • “Greatness does not rise or fall with the stock market.”
  • “True leadership is a process of addition, not an act of division.”

So, who spoke those words?  John Kennedy in 1960? Lyndon Johnson in 1964?  Hubert Humphrey in 1968? How about Barak Obama in 2008?   

Try George W. Bush in 2000.  Yes, those compassionate, caring  and inclusive thoughts came from the last Republican president prior to the dark and daunting dawn of Trumpism, an era that began with quite a different nomination acceptance speech:  “I alone can fix it.”  

It’s jarring to read Bush’s speech just as Trump prepares to accept the GOP nomination for four more years of chaos and corruption. Although only two decades have passed, it’s easy to forget that the Republican party once had actual values, that it stood for principles larger than electoral self-preservation.

Here’s how Stuart Stevens, a veteran Republican operative, put it in a Washington Post op-ed: “Most Republicans would have said that the party stood for some basic principles: fiscal sanity, free trade, strong on Russia, and that character and personal responsibility count. Today, it’s not that the Republican party has forgotten these issues and values; instead, it actively opposes all of them.”

Donald Trump not only owns this party, he has remade it in his own image.  Most historians mark the birth of Republicanism in 1854 when members of the Whig party broke away over the Whigs’ embrace of slavery.  Little did they know that, 166 years later, their anti-slavery movement would evolve into a white grievance party. 

This bizarre evolution, however, has less to do with conscious and deliberate policy changes, and everything to do with raw fear. It wasn’t as if Trump got congressional Republicans to alter their beliefs and values based on the strength and logic of his argument. Instead, it was that figurative gun he held to their heads, a weapon in the form of a single tweet that could end their political careers faster than a speeding bullet.

Focusing strictly on Trump’s merits back in 2016, many prominent Republicans rejected him. That rejection was a gift in disguise. He used it to fire up his base, to bond with them over their shared disdain and distrust for the elite political class.  This president’s fire power has always been his base, a passionate contingent of fed up white folks searching in vain for a rebirth of the 1950s. 

Here’s what some of the GOP stars were calling Trump before the 2016 election:  

Senator Lindsey Graham:  “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”

Senator Ted Cruz:  “pathological liar, utterly amoral,  a sniveling coward.”

Former Congressman Mick Mulvaney:  “terrible human being.”

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry:  “a cancer on conservatism, a barking carnival act.”

Once Trump was elected, and his base displayed its steroidal bona fides, the Republican establishment caved, abandoning all remnants of beliefs, values and decency. Winning elections was all that mattered. That meant keeping The Donald happy and avoiding a demeaning tweet. So, Graham became Trump’s golf buddy, confidant and best friend in the Senate. Cruz sang his praises whenever possible. Mulvaney became his chief of staff. Perry joined the Trump Cabinet as Energy Secretary. 

Those few congressional Republicans who refused to march in lockstep with Trump either retired or were defeated for reelection. For the most part, their replacements have been sycophantically aligned with the president.

This is not at all how Republicans envisioned its future a mere seven years ago. In 2013, GOP leaders, ordered a probing and strategic evaluation of the party. It had lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Many key states that had been considered Republican territory were increasingly voting Democratic. The result was an eye-opening reckoning with demographics. 

Here’s the upshot of that study: In a country where the Caucasian majority is on a steadily downward spiral to minority status, and where women and LGBTQ folks are both growing as a constituency and gravitating to the Democrats, the GOP needs a much larger tent.  In other words, white men alone will not save Republicans from extinction. Under the banner of the Growth and Opportunity Project, the party allocated $10 million to back comprehensive pro-immigration reform and outreach to women, Black, Asian, Latino and LGBTQ voters.

And then along came Donald Trump. As Stuart Stevens, the Republican political consultant, put it, Trump “didn’t hijack the GOP and bend it to his will.” Instead, he sensed correctly that there was no burning desire for big tent diversity in this party. So he, in Stevens’s words, “offered himself as a pure distillation of accumulated white grievance and anger.”  

What most of us saw as acts of compassion, caring and inclusion, Trump decried as political correctness. He encouraged division and white supremacy as the justifiable fruits of political incorrectness. “Trump didn’t make America more racist,” Stevens wrote, “he just normalized the resentments that were simmering in many households. . .and let a lot of long-suppressed demons out of the box.” 

Like everything Trumpian, this mind-boggling 2016 course correction – a reversal, actually – was rooted only in the moment it happened, with absolutely no thought of long-term strategy. Even in that moment, it just barely worked. Trump won with 46.1 percent of the vote. 

The GOP’s 2013 study is more germane than ever. A party tailored to the enmity of angry white men has no long-term future in a country that is growing more racially and ethnically diverse by the day. 

The only hope for Republicans is that Joe Biden scores an overwhelming victory in November. That might be enough for them to finally realize that the pro-slavery Whigs their party broke from 166 years ago was reincarnated into the Party of Donald Trump.  

They badly need to sever those bonds.

BEWARE OF UNWISE MEN BEARING SIMPLISTIC IDEAS

A long time ago, in what now seems like a galaxy far, far away, conservatives possessed an intellectual rigor that drove their vision of laissez-faire government, individual liberty and a free market economy. Although not my cup of tea, this political philosophy reflected an honest, rational and structured approach to governance.   That’s all gone now, replaced by the impulses of angry, feeble thinkers whose approach to leadership is vastly inferior to that of a gaggle of drunken sailors.  

Surely conservative giants like Barry Goldwater, William Buckley and Milton Friedman are spinning in their graves – to the right of course – as their movement devolves into a frantic rush toward foolish, simplistic and jingoistic responses to complicated problems. Whether it’s Brexit in Europe or Trump’s wall at the Mexican border, we are living in an age of political thoughtlessness.  It’s as if that crazy uncle who delights in listing the inane things he’d do if only he were king, was suddenly wearing a crown.  

Yes, conventional conservatives like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, rank high on the nuisance scale with their trickle-down shell games and burning desire to raid Social Security.  But at least they had the cognitive wherewithal to come up with specific, detailed plans that would further their objectives, as onerous as they be to many of us.  This new breed of right wing populism seems to be propelled by non-ideas.  Instead of concrete plans, we get metaphoric images that whip up the base but offer not the slightest hint of an actual solution.

Donald Trump was jubilant this week over a federal judge’s decision striking down the entire Affordable Care Act, also known – particularly  by Trump rally fans – as  Obamacare.  If the ruling survives appellate review, the president insisted there will be “great healthcare results for Americans!”  The Donald and his disciples have been railing, ranting and raging over Obamacare since the Republican primaries nearly three years ago.  Not once – during the primaries, the general election campaign or his first two years as president – has Trump ever offered the slightest hint of what he thinks “great healthcare” would consist of.  He has never had anything resembling a constructive thought about healthcare. It was all about capturing the adulation of the Obama-haters, with no regard to what happens to people who lose their insurance.  To Trump and his minions, “Abolish Obamacare” was as void of meaning as “Lock Her Up”. The juices of anger flowed, but there wasn’t a single policy thought to be had.

This is the same kind of thought-deprived leadership that has thrown the United Kingdom into a perpetual state of crisis. Just as America-first Trumpism was gaining steam in 2016, conservative populism roared through the UK, emotionally propelled by the simplistic notion that life could be made great again with a one-word plan: LEAVE.  By a 52 percent margin, the Brits voted in a national referendum to secede from the European Union.  Zero thought was given to the practical policy implications of secession, and Parliament, after two painful years of trying to come up with a divorce decree, is nowhere close to an agreement.  That means the separation may well occur in March without a single plan on how to handle such details as trade, taxes, financial payments and immigration policy. The Bank of England has warned of a “deep and damaging recession with worse consequences for the UK economy than the 2008 financial crisis.”  LEAVE made for a powerful chant, but it was completely content-free, void of any details about how the breakup would affect people’s lives.

Back home, Trump has threatened to end the week with a partial government shutdown over another of his one-word campaigns. Like a toddler pleading for a favorite toy, the president has been yammering for his WALL, his “big, beautiful” wall, a magical wall that will restore America’s greatness by keeping people with brown skin out of the country.  

There are few public policy issues more complex and involved than immigration, which is one reason Congress has been unable to tackle the issue in a satisfactory manner for more than 30 years.  And then along comes Trump and his one-word fix.  “Build the WALL”, is at or near the top of the charts for his campaign rally chants. As if architecture could solve one of the world’s thorniest problems.  

As of last year, nearly 60 million people have been forced by violence and conflict to flee their homes. More than half of all refugees are under 18.  According to the United Nations, if all those asylum-seekers and refugees were a country, it would be the twenty-first most populous nation in the world. In the U.N.’s view this crisis is the worst it has been since World War II and will steadily become worse as violent conflicts grow and climate change wreaks havoc. Yet, the alleged leader of the free world directs none of the vast resources at his disposal to find meaningful responses to these problems. Instead, he yaps incessantly about his wall as the magical cure for a broken immigration system.  And on climate change, he offers a rake.

The only upside to the right’s cataclysmic populism, is that it is difficult to envision a scenario where it has staying power. By definition, simplistic solutions to complicated problems fail. The essence of their brief life span lies in the visceral illusion of workability.  Cracks are already bringing to show. Polls track a steady approval increase for the elements of the Affordable Care Act, even among those who disliked Obama.  They don’t want to lose their insurance.  Faced with potentially severe consequences of leaving the E.U., many Brexit supporters have expressed buyers’ remorse. That’s not to say there won’t be serious fallout from this politics of mindlessness. It is merely a reminder of the governing principle that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.