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.

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