The UnDemocratic Party?
An Anti-Imperialist Considers this Bizarre
Presidential Election, and the American Compact
In 2016, for the first time in my life, I
didn’t vote for president. Oh, I did go to the polls like a good democrat and
Democrat, just as I have every four years since I pulled the lever for George
McGovern in 1972, to vote on the other offices. But I just couldn’t support
either candidate for president. Right now, I’m one of the few remaining
undecideds during this election campaign in a time of troubles that defies fiction
– pandemic, mass protest, revolutionary violence with little state resistance, the
capture of both major parties by their extremes, and even a president with
coronavirus.
Voting is in my blood. Despite always
living where the electoral votes are a foregone conclusion, from my parents’
example and exhortations I’ve always accepted the privilege, duty, and agonizing
of voting as if the decision rested with me. My father, Clinton Rossiter, was a
cheerleading historian of the American founding and an optimistic political
scientist of the American present. My mother, Mary Ellen Rossiter, would spend the
entire four years for each cycle pondering her vote. She would read and
discuss, and then place her bets. In 2008 I had to treat her to a dream weekend
of concerts and dinners in New York when Barack Obama came out of nowhere to
knock off Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
(I confess my sin: even though I’ve held local
office myself, I’ve never been interested in races below the federal level. When
I show up at the polls, I’m usually clueless and disinterested about them. City
Council? Town Supervisor? School Board? Statehouse? It just feels like these
offices deal with First World problems that are constrained by federal
choices.)
My
life and work have been devoted to ending the American empire that replaced the
European ones after World War II as the enforcer of Western interests in the
formerly-colonized world. Until this year I’ve always voted primarily on
foreign policy grounds. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was too proven and dangerous
an imperialist for
me to support, and
Donald Trump was, well, Donald Trump of Wrestlemania. As it turned out, Trump
was actually far less warlike than Clinton. Although he never
questions the alliances with dictators that sustain the American empire, his
gut instinct against “endless wars” led him to turn down numerous misguided
proposals by his generals and national security advisers.
Voting for Clinton, for me, would have
been like someone in the Viet Nam anti-war movement voting for any of the three
pro-war candidates in 1968, Humphrey, Nixon, or Wallace. Or like the (few) enfranchised
Negroes in Birmingham, Alabama, voting for the “moderate” segregationist Albert
Boutwell against the aggressive police commissioner Bull Connor in 1963. (Some
Negroes in Birmingham did back Boutwell, which he believed gave him the
victory. Called “just a dignified Bull Connor” by civil rights leader Fred
Shuttlesworth, he immediately tossed Martin Luther King Jr. into the jail where
he wrote his famed “Why We Can’t Wait” letter to whites like, well, Boutwell.)
In my 12
elections, starting with George McGovern in 1972, 2016 was the fourth time I
didn’t vote for the Democrat. So I’m still batting .667:
·
In
1980 I voted for Independent John Anderson, because Jimmy Carter had resolved
his schizophrenic choices of moderate Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State and
Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski as National Security Advisor in favor of the
Zbig-boy. That led to a devastating war in the Ogaden in Ethiopia and a “Rapid
Deployment Force” base agreement with the Somali dictator that has brought 40
years of chaos and suffering. Anderson took seven percent of the popular vote,
but did not appear to affect the big Reagan victory.
·
In
1996 I voted for Republican Bob Dole, because Bill Clinton had abandoned our party,
“triangulating” toward the Republicans after their 1994 capture of both House
and Senate. Scared to confront a Pentagon that was actually begging for his
leadership, Clinton became a full-time operative of the hawkish Democratic
Leadership Council. The DLC had pushed war upon war on the developing countries
as it tried to make up for our supposed global retreat after being beaten in
Viet Nam. Dole was his own man, a combat veteran like Eisenhower with the same
gimlet eye about both the military establishment and politicians who ignore the
cost and unpredictability of war. He was unlikely to have his dog wagged, in
the parlance of the day, into an excellent DLC lethal adventure.
·
In
2000 I voted for the Green, Ralph Nader. Nader was a non-interventionist whose
platform called for ending U.S. support for dictators, which was the core of
the Arms Trade Code of Conduct I had spent the 1990’s promoting. Gore was even
worse than Clinton on neocolonial wars. He was a Dixiecrat in the Senate when I
worked in Congress in the 1980’s and he constantly undercut our efforts to end
Central American civil wars and block new Pentagon nuclear weapons programs.
I breathed a sigh of relief when Joe
Biden became the “presumptive nominee.” I’d donated to anti-imperialist Tulsi
Gabbard, and later voted for her in our primary, but Joe is no Hillary-style,
or even Barack-style, global warrior. In the parlance of a book I wrote on
foreign policy called The Turkey and the
Eagle (the
stay-at-home Wild Turkey being Benjamin Franklin’s choice for our national
symbol, instead of the wide-ranging, thieving Eagle), Biden has been a Soft
Eagle, happy to have our empire but not willing to destroy countries in it to
save them, as was said and done about villages and a country in Viet Nam.
I’d worked with Senator Biden in the
1990’s on the Code of Conduct legislation that would have banned arms sales to
dictators, and as a congressional staffer I met with him in Pakistan in the
2000’s as part of an effort to find a way out of Afghanistan. From both
temperament and experience, he was by far the most cautious of all the senior
officials in the Obama administration about interventions and alliances, and
their unintended consequences. My vote was pretty clear.
But then, this spring and summer, the
craziness of the true Left that always bubbles on the fringe of the Democratic
Party took it over, and I had to reconsider my presidential choice. I know that
Left well, because it has been my home as an anti-imperialist for over 50 years.
While I’ve appreciated the Left for its foreign policy, I’ve always feared it
for its domestic policy, which is fundamentally Marxist and Leninist.
Marxist means, in this context, opposition to capitalism,
one of the two key tenets of the American experiment. You can dress it up and
call it Socialism, but the Left’s goal is still to control and make value
judgments about people’s economic activity – Marx’s state control of “the means
of production.”
Leninist means opposition to the other key
American tenet, democracy. That’s a hard word to define, but what I mean by it
here is respect for others and their opinions, and acceptance of the choices made
in elections and then of the laws the chosen ones make within our
constitutional framework. The Left’s program is truly one man, one vote, one
time, as the European colonialists said to justify their opposition to African
liberation – Lenin’s “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Since the day in 1969 when I came out of
an anti-war planning meeting at the University of Chicago and faced a group of
Weathermen and Women’s Liberation Movement activists screaming out Fidel
Castro’s “Up Against the Wall,” I’ve known that if the Left ever took power,
I’d be among the first they’d put there and execute. The irony was not lost on
me when the Weathermen avoided prison for their 1970’s terrorist bombing
campaign because the courts they would eliminate ruled that the government had
violated the constitutional rights they would eliminate.
And the consensus at the staff meetings
at the leftist Institute for Policy Studies where I was a foreign policy fellow over
a period of 23 years was just as Marxist and Leninist as Chicago, 1969. In 1991
the staff justified riots and looting in the Mount Pleasant and Adams-Morgan –
“shopping” expeditions piggybacked onto protests over a black police officer
defending herself from a knife-wielding Hispanic man – as righteous acts of liberation.
In 2011 the offices reeked of the Occupy Wall Street crowd that had been free
tenants during various shower-free protests. By 2014 I’d been fired for writing
about the well-known reality that Africa needs fossil-fueled electricity to
raise life expectancy.
The Democratic Party for whom I ran for
Congress in 1998 was the party of regulated capitalism, broad-based economic growth,
opportunity for the working man and woman, tolerance of diverse opinion, freedom
of speech, minority rights, voting rights, and the rule of law. But the party has
kowtowed rather than challenged its “progressive” Left wing for too long, and now
has been captured by it. As Scott Hibbard has
written, the
Republican Party similarly flirted with, and then was captured by, the
religious Right in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Then it went even farther right to accommodate
the Tea Party, well before Donald Trump’s rise to power.
The Democratic Party now promotes “Green”
economic stagnation, censors dissenting speech from the public forum, and lets
a mob decide policy with violence or threats. It practices identity politics that
undercut the education policies and social narrative that could uplift people in
high-poverty neighborhoods, and empowers the Marxist-Leninist leadership of Black
Lives Matter to demonize and defund the police who protect them.
Putting Democrats in control of House, Senate,
and Presidency is a hell of gamble on Joe Biden’s inclination as president to ignore
the promises he has made to the Left as a candidate. Divided government feels a
lot safer than united rule by today’s Democratic leaders. The Supreme Court
will be conservative, of course, but it has shown itself recently to be more of
a constitutional barrier to dubious executive orders arising from divided
government than to laws emanating from a united one.
Just What Is on the Ballot?
Vice President Biden said in his
acceptance speech that this November, “Character is on the ballot. Compassion is on
the ballot. Decency, science, democracy. They are all on the ballot.” He is
right.
Being the “Voice of the People, the
leading formulator and expounder of public opinion,” my father wrote way back
in 1957 in The
American Presidency,
is one of the “additional limbs grafted onto the original trunk” of
constitutionally-defined presidential duties. While the president “acts as
political leader for some, he serves as moral spokesman for all.” In this function,
he is “the American people’s one authentic trumpet.”
Every American should want their
president to display personally the values Biden says are on the ballot. They
do define, as he continued, “Who we are as a nation. What we stand for. And, most importantly,
who we want to be.” But
when he says that, “the choice could not be clearer,” he runs up against the values now
being displayed by our party. For me, the choice is now murky:
Energy policy:
To keep the Bernie Sanders wing happy, Biden agreed to ban 80 percent of
American energy, which would force reliance on expensive and unreliable wind
and solar power. This “Green New Deal,” which would devastate
our economy and health, is a kooky non-solution to a future problem that only exists in
computer models that are “tuned” to create it.
Emissions of carbon dioxide from the
world’s fossil fueled-energy add between two and three parts per million to the
atmosphere every year. At this rate it would take about 200 years for levels of
this non-polluting plant and plankton food to double to eight percent of one
percent of the atmosphere, adding about a degree Celsius of warming to the
global average temperature. That’s the same amount that’s been added since 1900
(largely naturally, as the much-cited but rarely-read reports of the UN
climate body quietly admit) with no statistically-significant increase in rates of extreme weather
or sea-level rise.
Even worse, through its little-known
carbon colonialism, the Green New Deal will hamper efforts to reduce poverty
around the world. Only a third of Africans have access to electricity, and as a
result life expectancy is 15 years below the global average. For a variety of
technical reasons, coal will remain a crucial part of Africa’s electrification.
Under Biden, African governments will be denied U.S. and World Bank funding for
even modern, pollution-eliminating coal-fired electricity plants, and have to pay
punishing penalties on their exports to America when China builds them anyway,
without pollution controls. Under Trump, they’ll have a fighting chance.
Freedom of Speech and the Cancel Culture: About 20 years ago, the Left stopped
promoting debates and started pushing political correctness – essentially, censorship.
This was a watershed in American history. Previously, the Left believed it
could win an open debate, and so always invited opponents to, for example, Viet
Nam War “teach-ins.” The duel narrative of climate catastrophe and easy “renewable”
energy solutions provided the test case for this new approach. After a ten-year,
well-organized campaign led to the acquiescence of the left-leaning media, skeptics
of this fanciful narrative were transformed into “deniers” of realities as
certain as the Holocaust.
Scientists, engineers, and economists who
are skeptical about even the wildest of claims in this complex set of topics are
now banned from the public forum because of threats to boycott advertisers in scholarly,
general, and social media, and to block grants to universities and non-profit scientific
and advocacy groups. Democrats in Congress have turned “climate” hearings into
spectacles in which witnesses are harassed with slanderous speeches that never
turn into a question they are allowed to answer. And they pressure social media
and tech firms to ban dissenting views on climate science and energy economics
from their platforms and the conferences they sponsor.
The success of the great climate
shout-down encouraged campus-disrupting protests on other trendy issues.
Students pushed universities to promote identity policies and unbalanced codes
on hate speech and sexual allegations that effectively criminalized differences
of opinion and manners. Now, the cancel culture has seeped into society as a
whole. Anybody outside the progressive consensus on any issue knows they can
become a target, not just professionally and financially, but physically –
whether at home, at a restaurant, or on the street in a MAGA cap.
For all of Trump’s tenure, the Democratic
Party has adhered to the philosophy emblazoned on leftists’ lawn signs: RESIST.
As a member of the last real American resistance, the draft resistance during
the invasion of Viet Nam, and a veteran of necessary congressional compromises
on other fundamental foreign policy disputes, I disagree wholeheartedly.
Resistance, rather than compromise, is appropriate only when you reject the
governing compact, when you are a rebel, like in an occupied or criminal country.
As my father wrote in Parties
and Politics in America in 1960:
No America without democracy, no
democracy without politics, no politics without parties, no parties without compromise
and moderation…All but the first of these are assumptions with which many Americans
find it hard to live.
Mob Rule: Even
more troubling is the Democratic Party’s acceptance of policy-making by mob.
There have been violent assaults on property and police in many Democratic-run cities,
and in only a few cases have there been arrests, bail to make them stick, and
trials to force plea deals with actual punishment. So, the mob rages on, taking
away power from elected officials and just tearing statues down themselves.
It’s one thing to be so ignorant of
American history that you use your elected authority, as DC mayor Muriel Bowser
recently proposed, to retitle a school named after Andrew Jackson. It’s quite
another to take it upon yourself to throw ropes around his statue and try to
tear it down, as the mob in Lafayette Park did in a Black Lives Matter protest.
Yes, as was typical for presidents until
the Civil War, Jackson was a slave-owner and an implementer of federal
legislation to move Indian tribes west of the Mississippi as a flood of Americans
poured onto Indian land, and their farming needs proved irreconcilable with
Indian hunting needs. But he was a brilliant general in the Creek wars in
Alabama in 1813 and 1814, and against the British in New Orleans in 1815. Even
more heroically, in the 1832 “nullification” crisis he made secession-minded
South Carolina back down, stating that “disunion, by armed force, is treason. Are
you ready to incur the guilt?”
Knowing Jackson’s reputation as a duelist
and his military preparations for the day secession was to take effect, South
Carolina’s legislature chose discretion over valor. About the president’s threat
to hang the first secessionist he could lay his hands on from the first tree he
could find, one senator cautioned that, “When Jackson starts talking about hanging,
they can begin to look out for ropes.” A Union-preserving president needs to be
studied, not erased.
Another troubling,
if initially non-violent, form of mob rule over the rule of law is the
Democrats’ National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Bills have passed in 16
states that commit their electoral votes to the winner not of the state vote
but of the national vote – but only after states with a majority of electoral
votes have signed on. This threat to amend the Constitution without meeting an
amendment’s high bar of two-thirds of both Houses and three-fourths of state
legislatures is likely to be found unconstitutional if ever tested, and certain
to cause chaos if ever used. More importantly, it shows contempt for the rule
of law like another cute Democratic Party evasion, the DC statehood bill that
would gut the constitutional role of the federal district.
Identity politics and black youth: Affirmative action after intense group-based
discrimination is an important short-term, but dangerous long-term, solution. For
55 years the United States has provided reparations to help African-Americans
catch up from slavery and segregation. The reparations come in separate tranches
for the higher and lower economic classes. The higher-income group gets preferential
admission to colleges and professional jobs, and financing and contracts for
businesses. The lower-income group gets the fruits of Lyndon Johnson’s War on
Poverty: Visiting Nurses in and after pregnancy, Head Start for early childhood
support, federal funding for K-12 and college, food assistance, Medicaid,
Medicare, and cash support.
More importantly, the federal and then
state governments promoted a societal recognition of the justice of equal
treatment and equal opportunity, and a societal stigma against overt
discrimination. These are now the norm in American society. However, there
continues to be a difference of opinion about the very dispute that split the
civil rights movement in the 1960’s. Martin Luther King’s goal of American
integration, which held that people should be seen primarily as individuals, is
still facing off with his black critics’ goal of Black Power separatism, which
held that people should be seen primarily as members of ethnic groups.
The eventual resolution of this dispute
is central to the progress of Americans whose lineage goes back to slavery. And
it is mostly a dispute arising from slavery, not blackness. For all the
challenges they may face, black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean are already
among the highest-achieving groups in America.
The
repairing of our social order has brought some progress, particularly in
strengthening the middle class, and some regression, particularly in crime and
schools. The cause of the nihilistic, work and success-averse “post-traumatic
slave syndrome” that I observed among my students when I taught in segregated
high-poverty high schools recently was identified by sociologist and NACCP
founder W. E. B. DuBois over 100 years ago, and affirmed by African-American
writers and leaders ever since. PTSS arises from the historical burden of the
alienation and resistance that came from three centuries of brutal, degrading
violence, the great betrayal of America’s founding principles that was meted
out or accepted by every white person in America.
For every action there is an equal and
opposite reaction, Newton posited, and it is just as true in oppression as in physics.
We are seeing that reality today, in the Black Lives Matter movement. “To be a Negro in this country and to be
relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time,” said James
Baldwin in 1961. Whether it’s rage or outrage, despair or sadness, the
outpouring of broad-based black protest to recent police killings is a reminder
that the pendulum is still swinging back. Each of the killings is a complex
stew of circumstances and justifications, but the imagery is instinctively unmistakable
to black America. President Lincoln hoped that the “mystic chords of memory”
would bind white Americans together to eschew civil war, but in this case they
will necessarily, for generations, drive us apart.
A black fragility to any insult to person
or life that is conceivably based on race is not just commendable, unavoidable historical
loyalty, but also a barrier to group progress. I come to this conclusion not
from theory, but from being exposed to its reality as a teacher. Identity
politics reinforces victimhood, the belief that your legal troubles or your lack
of success in various situations and endeavors are pre-ordained, and due to the
actions of others rather than yourself. Focusing on identity rather than
opportunity can be self-defeating.
This point was made by Booker T.
Washington in his 1900’s debates with DuBois on whether Negro advancement would
come more from economics or politics. More recently it was made by Coleman
Hughes in his duel
of testimonies in 2019
with Ta-Nehesi Coates on reparations to black Americans for slavery.
When he and his party swept the first
democratic election in South Africa in 1994, Nelson Mandela cautioned his
jubilant African countrymen, who had suffered an equally brutal heritage
but had their strong national (tribal) identity to see them through: “You are
not free. You are free to be free.” Opportunity was theirs, he was saying, not
guaranteed success. This is the opposite of the message that the Left has been
delivering to black youth for years, in anti-bias and anti-racism broadsides.
Mandela, by the way, immediately dumped
the Marxist platform of the African National Congress. He preserved capitalism
and the wealth it had generated for whites under apartheid, and was at pains to
keep white South Africans in the country, with their capital and their modern
work and investment ethics. He advocated, unpopularly with many African and Coloured
citizens, for whites to be accepted whole-heartedly as South Africans, and not be
seen as criminals because of past political evils.
As Martin Luther King said, “hate is too great
a burden to bear,” particularly for a people who would have to bear it on their
way to freedom. The initiator of King’s Montgomery bus boycott, Alabama State English
professor Jo Ann Robinson, said it well: “Hate does more harm to the hater than
to the hated.” And she lived that belief, in her firm but patient dignity and religiously-rooted
activism. Shakespeare warns us that: “To mourn a mischief that is past and gone
is the next way to draw new mischief on.” And he offers a remedy: “The robbed
that smiles steals something from the thief. He robs himself that spends a bootless
grief.”
The health “black tax” of PTSS is real, showing
up in anxiety-induced heart disease and infant mortality rates that far exceed those
expected from economic differences. But it is currently a self-imposed tax. The
success of black immigrants proves that. Coming from all-black cultures, with
the usual mix of achievers and sloths, they haven’t grown up thinking of
themselves as “black” versus the normative, historically-oppressive white. They
seize America’s incredible opportunities, compared to those in their lands of
origin, without reservation.
Focusing on parentage rather than
personal achievement is a racialist throwback. It cries out for someone to do
something for you. The focus should be on what you can control: your efforts. Telling
young black Americans that the solution does not lie in their own actions has
tragic consequences.
In the schools where I taught there was a
constant undertone of blaming every disappointment on racism rather than one’s
own work ethic. Humorously, one girl shouted down a boy who got his paper back
with a poor grade and accused me of picking on him because he was black: “Fool,
we all black, and we didn’t get an F! You just never come to class.” The entire
class, including the boy, cracked up.
Consider this recent claim by track star
Keturah Orji, which is foundational to the narrative that every decision made
about a black person by a person in authority is based on race, and not the
general rules for all. In an interview in Track and Field News (“The Bible of the
Sport”), she said: “The first time I actually felt systemic racism was when I
was suspended my senior year (for refusing to leave her coach’s office when
another teacher told her she couldn’t stay there unsupervised)….I realized this
is actually that people didn’t hear us because of our skin…She claimed (their
interaction) was intimidation, harassment, bullying, and I’m 5’ 5”, there’s
nothing scary about me.”’ Being black and short, in this approach, means a free
pass from the rules and any truculence in following them.
Of course race is always present in America.
In retrospective interviews about the integrated Stax record label in 1960’s
Memphis, all the white staff and musicians say literally the same line: “We
never saw color.” All the blacks wince when they hear this, and say, no, you
had to see color in that time. Even integrationists should see color, and appreciate
the different challenges people face. However, color shouldn’t determine
decisions. When running non-governmental groups I followed pro football’s “Rooney
Rule” of diverse hiring pools, not necessarily diverse outcomes. The Democratic
Party, in contrast, is backing a referendum in November to reverse California’s
ban on affirmative action, and again allow ethnicity to play a role in admission
to elite state universities.
The public school establishment,
essentially a Democratic Party apparatus, has replaced a national narrative of
opportunity with a national narrative of victimhood. If the system is rigged
against you, and everybody in it is a white supremacist, there’s little point
in trying -- especially when they keep passing you anyway.
A training flyer over the Xerox machine
in the teachers’ lounge at one of my schools identified teachers’ racist lack
of belief in our black students as the reason they don’t succeed. Segregating
the poorest, most challenged families into their own schools? Passing students
from first grade up who don’t attend or do the work? Nah – it’s the racist teachers
who don’t believe in them that keep them from gaining the skills and knowledge
they need to succeed in college. A conservative is a liberal who had to sit
through anti-bias training. At least you don’t have to any more in the federal
government. “I ended it because it’s racist,” explained President Trump. He’s
right.
The New York Times’ ahistorical “1619” project,
which dates America’s founding not in 1776, but in the year the first slaves
arrived in Virginia, is a logical consequence of the Democratic Party’s
surrender to racialism. Like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United
States, 1619 criticizes American history for being celebratory and exaggerated
and loose with the facts. True enough, but then it doubles down on these faults.
As in most of its political reporting these days, the Times has become a tendentious
propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.
Historical fact contradicts 1619’s whoppers,
like the claim that the Revolution was caused by British attempts to end slavery:
“Conveniently left out of our founding mythology
is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare
their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the
institution of slavery.” No,
British moves to free slaves of rebels, not Tories, for military purposes only
came after the revolt, which had been brewing for years because of British
control of taxes and Appalachian lands. Other claims are discussed here by
a group of historians.
The entire 1619 project is framed under this
banner: “Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written. Black
Americans have fought to make them true.” This takes a complex historical issue
and twists it into a simple rhetorical fact. You could just as well say that
the ideals were true, and in need of perfecting in practice, something that Americans
of many ethnicities have promoted.
The project director, Nikole Hannah-Jones,
who felt degraded by her father flying the American flag and believes that, “No
matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead,” has now admitted that 1619 “never
intended to be a history.” Rather, she says, it is an “argument…to control the
national narrative…the nation’s shared memory of itself.” The New York Times even
took down from its project website its original claim that 1619, and not 1776,
was the true founding date of America, and edited its founding statement to be
less categorical, without noting these corrections. I hope all this keeps 1619 from
being presented without countervailing perspectives in schools.
Historical memory is a crucial part of life.
I run a website focused on how America presents its empire to itself, and I wrote
a book on the Viet Nam war largely to counter our thundering silence about its
meaning. I applaud Langston Hughes’ explanation that “America never was America
for me,” and Obama preacher James Wright’s exhortation, “Not God bless, America;
God damn America…for treating her citizens as less than human.” These explain
the reality of black life, the reality of PTSS, that we all need to understand.
I believe that school children should
know George Washington’s slave-owning record before they cut out shapes of
cherry trees on his birthday, and that Veterans’ Day celebrations should
include a discussion of the wars they fought, and whether they were fought for
freedom and protection of our citizens, as incessantly claimed, or for imperial
expansion. But the facts have to be accurate. So far, my party hasn’t shown the
temerity to make that the case.
The Revolutionary Agenda of Black Lives
Matter: There are two parts to the narrative promoted by the
trio of self-described “trained Marxists” who created and lead Black Lives
Matter. Eric Mann, an unrepentant survivor of the 1970’s terrorist group, the
Weathermen, who also fixated on “the pigs” and even tried to murder them, was BLM
leader Patrisse Cullors’ “mentor.”
The first part of the BLM
narrative is that a fundamentally racist country is the key barrier to black
progress. The second part is that black people suffer more than other ethnic
groups from wanton police violence and prejudiced legal punishment.
The first claim, as
discussed above, is an arguable conclusion, and is based on a politicized and
sometimes dubious chain of assumptions. The second claim is a blatant falsehood
that is promoted as part of the BLM leadership’s revolutionary agenda. BLM has not
formally announced, as the Weathermen did, that they are seeking to overthrow
our method of government in favor of a communist dictatorship, but once the
police are “defunded” and the prisons are emptied, it will obviously be a lot easier
to seize power.
A higher share of blacks than whites are
killed by police. While African-Americans are 12 percent of the country, they account
for a quarter of the 1,000 annual police killings. However, detailed analysis
of police shootings show “no racial differences” in the use
of deadly force
against suspects. How can this be? Of course, the key is, how does one become such a suspect? Mostly by threatening police with a weapon.
As
has probably been the case since DuBois worried about this “vast problem” in
1899, blacks commit far more crimes per-capita than other ethnic groups, and so
find themselves in armed confrontations with police more often, per-capita. But
once in an armed confrontation with police, they are no more at risk of being
shot.
Black parents famously have “the talk”
with their children about not resisting arrest, but anybody who has spent time
with poor black youth knows the “attitude” that displaces “the talk,” and leads
to dangerous escalation in interactions with police. After centuries of having
to accept violent degradation, African-Americans are now programmed not to back
down when told what to do by a cop. They are as culturally incapable of backing
down as the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert was when he wrote about the communists
who collaborated with the Soviet Union: “Do not forgive – truly it is not in
your power to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn.” And police simply
don’t back down, to anybody, of any color.
Breonna Taylor was killed
in Louisville by police as they returned fire at her boyfriend. When the grand
jury declined to charge them for her death, her lawyer said that the decision
endorsed the “genocide of persons of color by white police officers.” LeBron
James, the star of the trendily politically-correct National Basketball
Association, Tweeted: “The most DISRESPECTED person on earth is THE BLACK WOMAN!”
About 7,500 black Americans are killed
each year, half
of all homicides.
Only three percent are killed by police, while 90 percent are killed by other
black Americans. Because armed victims account for between 92 to 99 percent of
police shootings (depending on the definition of armed, such as toy guns that
the police believed were real), between 99.7 and 99.9 percent of blacks killed
are NOT killed by police facing unarmed people. If there is a genocide, if
there is a world-leading disrespect, it’s coming from someone other than the
police.
In their push to defund police and
release prisoners, the BLM leaders are abetted by Democrats, including,
ironically, the son and adopted son of four murderous Weathermen, the
newly-elected district attorney of San Francisco. An agent of the “progressive”
movement in judicial reform, Chesa Boudin ended
cash bail and promises to arrest
ICE agents rather than let them seize criminals who are in the country
illegally.
Claims of a “new Jim Crow” regime that puts
black people in prison for political reasons are false. For a variety of
complex and still unproven reasons, rates of violent crime tripled
from 1960 to 1980. As a result, prison populations doubled, and then crime
rates returned to their former level. African-Americans committed crimes at a
higher rate than other ethnic groups, and so were imprisoned at higher rates.
The Election and the Future of America
I agreed with Ronald Reagan on only one
thing when I worked in Congress in the 1980’s: in this country’s politics, we must
be opponents, and not enemies. It’s getting harder to hold onto that belief. The
recent craziness has revealed that a broad swath of the Left considers the
rules of democracy passé, and supports censorship and cancelling the opinions, and
indeed the livelihoods, of others. They’ve made it clear that they think opponents
are enemies.
Seeing other Americans as aliens,
representing an alien loyalty, is a recipe for civil war and totalitarianism. Democratic
presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg wisely said: “You can’t love a country if
you hate half of the people in it.” Well, I don’t hate my compatriots who want
to silence rather than debate me, but it’s becoming increasingly hard not to
see them as enemies of our form of government, in both letter and spirit. However,
I still believe in accepting and respecting the results of elections, and the
laws that those elected then pass.
I wanted this election to
be about the end to endless wars versus the beginnings of new ones. But it’s
about something even more fundamental now: our approach to each other. I don’t
know which party’s candidate I’ll support in November -- actually October, when,
COVID-fearful as I am, I'll send my mail-in ballot. But I do know that the election
won’t resolve anything.
As in Africa, to reverse
Clausewitz, politics has become an extension of war by other means. The Left
will become a harder Left, the Right will become a harder Right, and the
concentration of like-minded voters by choice and design will mean that
Congress will have far less moderates in the middle than our share of the
population deserves. But, pace Yeats, the centre can still hold in our
widening gyre. We have to.
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