There's an old story that in 1787 at the close of the Constitutional Convention, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin if the Constitution would produce a republic or a monarchy. "A Republic, if you can keep it," replied Franklin.
A 2014 Northwestern University study concluded that the United States is not a democratic republic but an oligarchy of economic elites: "Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
"When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it."
I've discussed at length in this series how big money interests have subverted democracy in America, but there's an elephant in the room I haven't talked about yet. Republican voter suppression tactics aside, it's for the most part the American people themselves who have forfeited their own rights by either not voting or by electing Republicans. The US has a two-party political system. One party, the Republicans, has for the past several decades sought to curtail voting rights, workers' rights, immigrants' rights, minority rights and just about every legal right afforded to human beings in favor of the power of the economic elites commonly referred to as the "1%". The Democratic party, by contrast, has tried (often not hard enough, granted) to protect people power.
So why have Americans allowed this to happen? I think there are three reasons.
1. Apathy
Only about 6 in 10 Americans vote in Presidential election years, and about 4 in 10 in the midterms. Research shows that a majority of young people don't think voting is an effective way to change society. Republicans have few qualms perpetuating those feelings among young voters, as nonvoters more likely to be poor, young, Hispanic or Asian-American and more likely to align with the Democratic Party.
2. People vote against their own interests
Non-college-educated white voters have gone all-in for Donald Trump and Republican politics. And what have they gotten in return? American workers are among the hardest working and most productive in the world, yet find themselves commonly living below the poverty line, denied healthcare, and denied basic benefits they would be guaranteed in other leading nations such as paid vacation and maternity leave and a retirement pension at a reasonable age.
Roger Ebert discussed the strange phenomenon of people voting against their economic interests in in a great 2011 article entitled, The One-Percenters. The article noted that Wall Street duped investors and wrecked the economy during the Great Recession, all while voting itself record bonuses. And the public's response?
"What puzzles me is why there isn't more indignation. The Tea Party is the most indignant domestic political movement since Norman Thomas's Socialist Party, but its wrath is turned in the wrong direction. It favors policies that are favorable to corporations and unfavorable to individuals. Its opposition to Obamacare is a textbook example. Insurance companies and the health care industry finance a "populist" movement that is manipulated to oppose its own interests. The billionaire Koch brothers payroll right wing front organizations that oppose labor unions and financial reform. The patriots wave their flags and don't realize they're being duped.
Consider taxes. Do you know we could eliminate half the predicted shortfall in the national budget by simply failing to renew the Bush tax cuts? Do you know that if corporations were taxed at a fair rate, much of the rest could be found? General Electric recently reported it paid no current taxes. Why do you think that was? Why do middle and lower class Tea Party members not understand that they bear an unfair burden of taxes that should be more fairly distributed? Why do they support those who campaign against unions and a higher minimum wage? What do they think is in it for them?"
Similarly, Thomas Frank wrote in the political study, What's the Matter with Kansas, "Out here the gravity of discontent pulls in only one direction: to the right, to the right, farther to the right. Strip today’s Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land, and next thing you know they’re protesting in front of abortion clinics. Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO, and there’s a good chance they’ll join the John Birch Society. But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed (unions, antitrust, public ownership), and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower."
3. Racism
2020 will mark the Quadricentennial celebration of the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. For 400 years old, white, wealthy, "Christian", allegedly heterosexual men have run everything in this country. Because white people have always been the majority, unless you count the Native Americans, which White America seldom has. But not for much longer. By the year 2045, America will become minority white. This is a prospect that terrifies white America. And I think it's the biggest reason why more white people are voting Republican, and voting for xenophobic white supremacists like Donald Trump.
Just this past week, economist Paul Krugman commented on this in the New York Times. Krugman noted that President Trump's economic policies are clearly terrible for rural America, and asked: "Why, then, do rural areas support Trump? A lot of it has to do with cultural factors. In particular, rural voters are far more hostile to immigrants than urban voters — especially in communities where there are few immigrants to be found. Lack of familiarity apparently breeds contempt."
Krugman has hit the nail on the head: a lot of Americans are prepared to keep an insane, lying criminal with no respect for democratic institutions in the White House, as long as he speaks to their fears of a browner America.
But the problem goes deeper than just a lot of Republicans and un-worldly rural people who believe a lot of lies about immigrant populations harming America. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 46 percent of white Americans fear that a non-white majority population in the US would weaken American "culture". Similarly, a 2014 New York University study showed that white people who read about the coming white non-white majority in America tend to favor more restrictive immigration policies.
So where does this all lead? Unfortunately, it leads us to even worse things than electing a white supremacist as President. The title of this NBC News article by Noah Berlastky says it all: The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism.
According to Berlatsky, while many cite increasing partisanship as the biggest threat to American democracy, "A new study, however, suggests that the main threat to our democracy may not be the hardening of political ideology, but rather the hardening of one particular political ideology. Political scientists Steven V. Miller of Clemson and Nicholas T. Davis of Texas A&M have released a working paper titled "White Outgroup Intolerance and Declining Support for American Democracy." Their study finds a correlation between white America's intolerance, and support for authoritarian rule. In other words, when intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy."
"Based on surveys from the United States, the authors found that white people who did not want to have immigrants or people of different races living next door to them were more likely to be supportive of authoritarianism. For instance, people who said they did not want to live next door to immigrants or to people of another race were more supportive of the idea of military rule, or of a strongman-type leader who could ignore legislatures and election results."
So is there any good news? Yes. Time is on the side of democracy. And not because the country is becoming less white. Consider a recent article by Colby Itkowitz of the Washington Post entitled: The next generation of voters is more liberal, more inclusive and believes in government.
"Generation Z, defined as those born after 1996, is on the cusp of adulthood. The oldest are graduating college. By 2020, almost half will be eligible to vote in the presidential election, which means their values and opinions could soon help shape national politics.
According to (a recent Pew Center) survey, released Thursday, Gen Z teens and young adults have overwhelmingly adopted left-leaning beliefs similar to those of the millennials before them. They overwhelmingly disapprove of President Trump, believe the government should do more and reject American exceptionalism.
It’s not uncommon for young people to hold liberal views that moderate as they age. But Gen Zers grew up in a very different world than previous generations. The oldest among them was 11 when the first black president was elected. They became teenagers as same-sex marriage was legalized around the country. They also, according to Pew, will be the most racially diverse and well-educated generation.
This younger generation is much more likely to see climate change as a result of human behavior and to believe black Americans are treated unfairly."
And it's not as if the Republican party is attempting any kind of outreach to less-conservative, multicultural young people, as party leaders suggested after Mitt Romney's loss in 2012. Long-time Republican strategist and leader of the "Never Trump" movement Rick Wilson commented last year that, "Everything we Never Trump folks warned you of, including massive, decades-long downstream election losses, is coming. Alienating African Americans and Hispanics beyond redemption? Check. Raising a generation of young voters who are fleeing the GOP in droves? Check. Age-old beefs, juvenile complaints, and ego bruises taking center stage while the world burns? Check. Playing public footsie with white supremacists and neo-Nazis? Check. Blistering pig-ignorance about the economy and the world? Check. … Shredding the last iota of the GOP’s credibility as a party that cares about debt, deficits, and fiscal probity? Check."
You know the Republican party is in trouble with minority voters when the only minority candidates it can find to run for Congress are just as racist and crazy as Donald Trump. Just this week the GOP was excited to announce the congressional bid of Cuban-American Irina Vilariño in Florida. Ms. Vilariño is known for backing various bigoted conspiracy theories, and has refused to apologize for promoting a fake video which makes President Obama appear to say he was born in Kenya.
In conclusion, this is the thread that ties together everything I've discussed in this series on the many threats to America's democratic institutions: White, conservative Americans see that in their lifetimes people of color will become a majority in this country, and they consider that a threat to white dominance of American culture. They also see that the new multicultural majority is rejecting the neo-liberal politics of Ronald Reagan and those who came after him that seek to perpetually grow power for the wealthy while brutalizing the poor. And the old conservative white hegemony does not intend to let a little thing like democracy curtail their power, culturally or politically.
Jason Sattler, opinion columnist for USA Today recently observed, "Republicans have given up on voters. America's future depends on whether Democrats can expand voting rights faster than the GOP can restrict them."
Every day, the tide of population demographics shifts a little more against the Trump voter. Democracy in this country may last longer than they do. I think it will.
Thanks for reading.
Thursday, May 16, 2019
Sunday, April 28, 2019
The Eclipse of American Democracy, Part Nineteen: Income Inequality Leads to Oligarchy
"In every society known to man," wrote founding father John Adams, "an aristocracy has risen up in the course of time, consisting of a few rich and honorable families who have united with each other against both the people and the first magistrate." Or as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned: "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both." To state the obvious, in any society great wealth will tend to wield great political power, and democracy will weaken as wealth inequality becomes more acute.
Of course that might not be the case if, say, the very wealthy used their political power to reduce income inequality and improve democratic institutions. But that of course seldom happens; the super-rich Koch brothers for example have an enormous influence on the American political scene and are not only very conservative but openly contemptuous of democracy, much less on any checks on the power of wealth to shape national policy. Worse, inequality in the U.S. has risen to levels not seen since the 1920s. The top 1 percent pocket more than 20 percent of the nation's income, and the 400 richest people in the country own more wealth than everyone in the bottom 50 percent.
The power of lobbyists to shape legislation and even their own government oversight has grown to ridiculous levels; corporations commonly write their own laws. Following the Great Recession for example, the Democratic Congress passed the law commonly known as Dodd-Frank to overhaul the financial regulatory system. By 2018 Republicans were back in power, and they of course exempted dozens of U.S. banks from the Dodd–Frank Act's banking regulations. A 2013 article in the New York Times by Eric Lipton and Ben Protess describes how Republicans make a mockery of their responsibilities to conduct oversight and protect public interests:
"The House Financial Services Committee has been a natural target. Not only is it controlled by Republicans, who had opposed Dodd-Frank, but freshmen lawmakers are often appointed to the unusually large committee because it is seen as a helpful base from which they can raise campaign funds."
"One bill that sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month — over the objections of the Treasury Department — was essentially Citigroup’s, according to e-mails reviewed by The New York Times. The bill would exempt broad swathes of trades from new regulation.
In a sign of Wall Street’s resurgent influence in Washington, Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill. Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word."
What to do? Matt Stoller of the think-tank the Open Markets Institute suggested in the Washington Post: "If we want to restore a democratic culture, we’re going to have to not just raise the pay of public servants, but reduce inequality dramatically. We must attack the problem of a two-tiered society. We must go after the concentration of corporate assets through strong competition and anti-monopoly policy so that we don’t have a society split between billionaires with rights and powerless peasants living with varying degrees of comfort. Basic public goods – quality education, health care, transportation, nutrition — must be available to all without the need to incur huge debts. Private sector CEOs perhaps should be able to have more lavish lifestyles than the rest of us, but it should be a matter of living a fancier version of the same life. No one should go broke if they have a medical problem, not just because that’s a problem in and of itself, but because that is a route to social corruption."
In other words, Stoller thinks the restoration of democracy would be a product of the re-introduction of basic New Deal-style liberalism, redistributing wealth and reining in big business and finance. I agree. For further thoughts on the subject, I'd like to quote at length former White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers writing in The Nation:
"The Greek historian Plutarch is said to have warned that “an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of a Republic.” Yet as the Washington Post pointed out recently, income inequality may be higher at this moment than at any time in the American past.
When I was a young man in Washington in the 1960s, most of the country’s growth accrued to the bottom 90% of households. From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, in fact, income grew at a slightly faster rate at the bottom and middle of American society than at the top. In 2009, economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez explored decades of tax data and found that from 1950 through 1980 the average income of the bottom 90% of Americans had grown, from $ 17,719 to $ 30,941. That represented a 75% increase in 2008 dollars.
Since 1980, the economy has continued to grow impressively, but most of the benefits have migrated to the top. In these years, workers were more productive but received less of the wealth they were helping to create. In the late 1970s, the richest 1% received 9% of total income and held 19% of the nation’s wealth. The share of total income going to that 1% would then rise to more than 23% by 2007, while their share of total wealth would grow to 35%. And that was all before the economic meltdown of 2007-2008.
Even though everyone took a hit during the recession that followed, the top 10% now hold more than three-quarters of the country’s total family wealth.
I know, I know: statistics have a way of causing eyes to glaze over, but these statistics highlight an ugly truth about America: inequality matters. It slows economic growth, undermines health, erodes social cohesion and solidarity, and starves education. In their study The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett found that the most consistent predictor of mental illness, infant mortality, low educational achievement, teenage births, homicides, and incarceration was economic inequality."
I encourage you to read Bill Moyers' article in its entirety. In my next post, this series on the eclipse of American democracy as orchestrated by conservatives and Republican officials comes to a close. Thanks for reading.
Of course that might not be the case if, say, the very wealthy used their political power to reduce income inequality and improve democratic institutions. But that of course seldom happens; the super-rich Koch brothers for example have an enormous influence on the American political scene and are not only very conservative but openly contemptuous of democracy, much less on any checks on the power of wealth to shape national policy. Worse, inequality in the U.S. has risen to levels not seen since the 1920s. The top 1 percent pocket more than 20 percent of the nation's income, and the 400 richest people in the country own more wealth than everyone in the bottom 50 percent.
The power of lobbyists to shape legislation and even their own government oversight has grown to ridiculous levels; corporations commonly write their own laws. Following the Great Recession for example, the Democratic Congress passed the law commonly known as Dodd-Frank to overhaul the financial regulatory system. By 2018 Republicans were back in power, and they of course exempted dozens of U.S. banks from the Dodd–Frank Act's banking regulations. A 2013 article in the New York Times by Eric Lipton and Ben Protess describes how Republicans make a mockery of their responsibilities to conduct oversight and protect public interests:
"The House Financial Services Committee has been a natural target. Not only is it controlled by Republicans, who had opposed Dodd-Frank, but freshmen lawmakers are often appointed to the unusually large committee because it is seen as a helpful base from which they can raise campaign funds."
"One bill that sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month — over the objections of the Treasury Department — was essentially Citigroup’s, according to e-mails reviewed by The New York Times. The bill would exempt broad swathes of trades from new regulation.
In a sign of Wall Street’s resurgent influence in Washington, Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill. Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word."
What to do? Matt Stoller of the think-tank the Open Markets Institute suggested in the Washington Post: "If we want to restore a democratic culture, we’re going to have to not just raise the pay of public servants, but reduce inequality dramatically. We must attack the problem of a two-tiered society. We must go after the concentration of corporate assets through strong competition and anti-monopoly policy so that we don’t have a society split between billionaires with rights and powerless peasants living with varying degrees of comfort. Basic public goods – quality education, health care, transportation, nutrition — must be available to all without the need to incur huge debts. Private sector CEOs perhaps should be able to have more lavish lifestyles than the rest of us, but it should be a matter of living a fancier version of the same life. No one should go broke if they have a medical problem, not just because that’s a problem in and of itself, but because that is a route to social corruption."
In other words, Stoller thinks the restoration of democracy would be a product of the re-introduction of basic New Deal-style liberalism, redistributing wealth and reining in big business and finance. I agree. For further thoughts on the subject, I'd like to quote at length former White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers writing in The Nation:
"The Greek historian Plutarch is said to have warned that “an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of a Republic.” Yet as the Washington Post pointed out recently, income inequality may be higher at this moment than at any time in the American past.
When I was a young man in Washington in the 1960s, most of the country’s growth accrued to the bottom 90% of households. From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, in fact, income grew at a slightly faster rate at the bottom and middle of American society than at the top. In 2009, economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez explored decades of tax data and found that from 1950 through 1980 the average income of the bottom 90% of Americans had grown, from $ 17,719 to $ 30,941. That represented a 75% increase in 2008 dollars.
Since 1980, the economy has continued to grow impressively, but most of the benefits have migrated to the top. In these years, workers were more productive but received less of the wealth they were helping to create. In the late 1970s, the richest 1% received 9% of total income and held 19% of the nation’s wealth. The share of total income going to that 1% would then rise to more than 23% by 2007, while their share of total wealth would grow to 35%. And that was all before the economic meltdown of 2007-2008.
Even though everyone took a hit during the recession that followed, the top 10% now hold more than three-quarters of the country’s total family wealth.
I know, I know: statistics have a way of causing eyes to glaze over, but these statistics highlight an ugly truth about America: inequality matters. It slows economic growth, undermines health, erodes social cohesion and solidarity, and starves education. In their study The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett found that the most consistent predictor of mental illness, infant mortality, low educational achievement, teenage births, homicides, and incarceration was economic inequality."
I encourage you to read Bill Moyers' article in its entirety. In my next post, this series on the eclipse of American democracy as orchestrated by conservatives and Republican officials comes to a close. Thanks for reading.
Sunday, April 07, 2019
The Eclipse of American Democracy, Part Eighteen: Shut Up and Pray? No, This Land is Your Land
In Part Fifteen of this series, I discussed how American politics in the late 20th century came to be dominated by the anti-government philosophies of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. But the cynicism of American conservatives goes a lot deeper than just believing that government cannot help solve our problems. In fact, they frequently express the idea (as have reactionaries throughout human history) that major societal problem cannot be solved at all, that human misery is just the natural the order of things until such time as God chooses to intervene.
Monarchs have always claimed to rule by divine right. You don't like what the King is doing? Too bad. He's God's personal appointee. The rich are supposed to be rich, and the poor supposed to be poor. Don't question it. Many people know the first verse of the 19th century Anglican hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful:
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.
But fewer remember verse 3:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.
But ideas like these wouldn't take hold in America, would they? The land where no man is king, and everyone can be wealthy? Don't be too sure. Woody Guthrie wrote the radical folk song, This Your Land is Your Land, in part in response to his annoyance with the song God Bless America. The last verse of This Your Land is Your Land is:
One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple,
by the relief office I saw my people.
As they stood hungry,
I stood there wondering if God blessed America for me.
Woody was suggesting that hungry Americans do something about the problems of the Great Depression and not just leave it up God to help them. I thought about this recently when White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway responded to the public discussion of the tragic Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, in which 50 people were killed and 50 others injured.
From Jillian Edevane of Newsweek: "[The media] must insert themselves. I must speak. I must say something," (Conway) said, referring to journalists and pundits. "No, you don’t. You can actually shut up and pray for people and wait for the authorities to make their judgments."
This is a post that might have belonged to the beginning of this series - a discussion of the basic differences between progressives and conservatives in how they think about collective action and problem solving. There's a reason why after a mass shooting Conway and those like her hope that the media and the public will shut and pray, and wait for "the authorities" to do something about the problem. It's because in America, if the authorities are Republicans, they will do nothing and the violence will continue.
The contrast between the response in New Zealand to the mosque shootings compared to the response to similar massacres in the United States could not be more stark. Within three days of the events at Christchurch, the government had placed a ban on semi-automatic weapons and announced a far-ranging government inquiry into events surrounding the attack. Compare that to the Republican response to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting that left 59 dead and hundreds more injured. From Benjamin Hart of New York Magazine,
"Leading the charge on Tuesday was South Dakota senator John Thune, who said in an interview with NBC News that, given the fact that there’s no way to stop a mass shooting from happening in an "open society," citizens’ best hope to avoid being violently killed is to … duck. "I think people are going to have to take steps in their own lives to take precautions to protect themselves. And in situations like that, you know, try to stay safe. As somebody said — get small.""
Learning to duck isn't a solution to gun violence any more than prayer was a solution to the Great Depression. And to give credit to Woody Guthrie one more time, he was also had something to say about the Trumps. From the New York Times:
"More than a half-century ago, the folk singer Woody Guthrie signed a lease in an apartment complex in Brooklyn. He soon had bitter words for his landlord: Donald J. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump."
"Mr. Guthrie, in writings uncovered by a scholar working on a book, invoked "Old Man Trump" while suggesting that blacks were unwelcome as tenants in the Trump apartment complex, near Coney Island."
""He thought that Fred Trump was one who stirs up racial hate, and implicitly profits from it," the scholar, Will Kaufman, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of Central Lancashire in Britain, said in an interview."
"In December 1950, Mr. Guthrie signed a lease at the Beach Haven apartment complex, Mr. Kaufman wrote in his piece. Soon, Mr. Guthrie was "lamenting the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighborhood," he wrote, with words like these:
I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project
Mr. Guthrie even reworked his song "I Ain’t Got No Home" into a critique of Fred Trump, according to Mr. Kaufman:
Beach Haven ain’t my home!
I just can’t pay this rent!
My money’s down the drain!
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!
Mr. Guthrie died in 1967, and in the 1970s, the Justice Department sued the Trumps, accusing them of discriminating against blacks. (A settlement was eventually reached; at the time, Trump Management noted the agreement did not constitute an admission of guilt.)
A spokeswoman for Donald Trump declined to comment on Mr. Guthrie’s writings."
If you're unfamiliar with just how much Donald Trump is a chip off the old block, consider what historians have to say about his father as a developer in New York City, "Every single Coney Island project that Fred Trump was involved in, from the 1940s throughout the 1960s, was touched by scandal, misappropriation of public funds, and political cronyism. The Beach Haven, Shore Haven, and Trump Village projects all led to allegations of impropriety and discrimination. There were federal hearings and investigations into Trump’s business practices, allegations of defrauding veterans in rental agreements, and charges of racism. Trump’s display of greed and avarice was unusual for a major developer. Unlike (sometime partner) Robert Moses, who was known as the master builder, Trump was more of a master manipulator. Federal laws had to be changed to prevent the kind of nefarious schemes that Trump excelled in."
Good night, and good luck.
Monarchs have always claimed to rule by divine right. You don't like what the King is doing? Too bad. He's God's personal appointee. The rich are supposed to be rich, and the poor supposed to be poor. Don't question it. Many people know the first verse of the 19th century Anglican hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful:
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.
But fewer remember verse 3:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.
But ideas like these wouldn't take hold in America, would they? The land where no man is king, and everyone can be wealthy? Don't be too sure. Woody Guthrie wrote the radical folk song, This Your Land is Your Land, in part in response to his annoyance with the song God Bless America. The last verse of This Your Land is Your Land is:
One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple,
by the relief office I saw my people.
As they stood hungry,
I stood there wondering if God blessed America for me.
Woody was suggesting that hungry Americans do something about the problems of the Great Depression and not just leave it up God to help them. I thought about this recently when White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway responded to the public discussion of the tragic Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, in which 50 people were killed and 50 others injured.
From Jillian Edevane of Newsweek: "[The media] must insert themselves. I must speak. I must say something," (Conway) said, referring to journalists and pundits. "No, you don’t. You can actually shut up and pray for people and wait for the authorities to make their judgments."
This is a post that might have belonged to the beginning of this series - a discussion of the basic differences between progressives and conservatives in how they think about collective action and problem solving. There's a reason why after a mass shooting Conway and those like her hope that the media and the public will shut and pray, and wait for "the authorities" to do something about the problem. It's because in America, if the authorities are Republicans, they will do nothing and the violence will continue.
The contrast between the response in New Zealand to the mosque shootings compared to the response to similar massacres in the United States could not be more stark. Within three days of the events at Christchurch, the government had placed a ban on semi-automatic weapons and announced a far-ranging government inquiry into events surrounding the attack. Compare that to the Republican response to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting that left 59 dead and hundreds more injured. From Benjamin Hart of New York Magazine,
"Leading the charge on Tuesday was South Dakota senator John Thune, who said in an interview with NBC News that, given the fact that there’s no way to stop a mass shooting from happening in an "open society," citizens’ best hope to avoid being violently killed is to … duck. "I think people are going to have to take steps in their own lives to take precautions to protect themselves. And in situations like that, you know, try to stay safe. As somebody said — get small.""
Learning to duck isn't a solution to gun violence any more than prayer was a solution to the Great Depression. And to give credit to Woody Guthrie one more time, he was also had something to say about the Trumps. From the New York Times:
"More than a half-century ago, the folk singer Woody Guthrie signed a lease in an apartment complex in Brooklyn. He soon had bitter words for his landlord: Donald J. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump."
"Mr. Guthrie, in writings uncovered by a scholar working on a book, invoked "Old Man Trump" while suggesting that blacks were unwelcome as tenants in the Trump apartment complex, near Coney Island."
""He thought that Fred Trump was one who stirs up racial hate, and implicitly profits from it," the scholar, Will Kaufman, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of Central Lancashire in Britain, said in an interview."
"In December 1950, Mr. Guthrie signed a lease at the Beach Haven apartment complex, Mr. Kaufman wrote in his piece. Soon, Mr. Guthrie was "lamenting the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighborhood," he wrote, with words like these:
I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project
Mr. Guthrie even reworked his song "I Ain’t Got No Home" into a critique of Fred Trump, according to Mr. Kaufman:
Beach Haven ain’t my home!
I just can’t pay this rent!
My money’s down the drain!
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!
Mr. Guthrie died in 1967, and in the 1970s, the Justice Department sued the Trumps, accusing them of discriminating against blacks. (A settlement was eventually reached; at the time, Trump Management noted the agreement did not constitute an admission of guilt.)
A spokeswoman for Donald Trump declined to comment on Mr. Guthrie’s writings."
If you're unfamiliar with just how much Donald Trump is a chip off the old block, consider what historians have to say about his father as a developer in New York City, "Every single Coney Island project that Fred Trump was involved in, from the 1940s throughout the 1960s, was touched by scandal, misappropriation of public funds, and political cronyism. The Beach Haven, Shore Haven, and Trump Village projects all led to allegations of impropriety and discrimination. There were federal hearings and investigations into Trump’s business practices, allegations of defrauding veterans in rental agreements, and charges of racism. Trump’s display of greed and avarice was unusual for a major developer. Unlike (sometime partner) Robert Moses, who was known as the master builder, Trump was more of a master manipulator. Federal laws had to be changed to prevent the kind of nefarious schemes that Trump excelled in."
Good night, and good luck.
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