The Creation of a Political Myth

 The “Stolen Election” is a Perfect Issue for Republicans

Ted Cruz and 10 other GOP senators join Hawley in attempt to throw out election results: CNN's Tapper - Raw Story - Celebrating 16 Years of Independent Journalism. This is a perfect issue for the contemporary Republican Party. It is perfect because the effort to throw out the electoral results will fail, and therefore, the issue of “stolen elections” will continue to motivate voters in the future.

The Fragile Republican Alliance Needs Issues that Don’t Go Away

Today’s Republican Party is a fragile and unstable alliance between Trump’s populist followers and the traditional, business Republicans. The populist wing is useful to the party because it brings in millions of votes, but the business Republicans never really want to enact populist policies. They want tax cuts and reduced regulation of business, but those are not issues that excite most people.

To appeal to ordinary voters, the Republicans use cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage, and the party supports coded race-baiting. For the Republican Party, the great thing about these issues is that they don’t go away. They never get resolved. So, they can be used over and over again to appeal to voters. They are permanent grievances that can bring people to the polls.

The issue of the “stolen election” is ideal in that way. Millions of people will never believe that the election was fairly won by Mr. Biden. Instead, they will continue to believe that a shadowy “elite” stole the election, and that grievance will bring votes to the Republicans for years to come. Thus, the “stolen election” myth will function as the “lost cause” myth functioned in Southern politics for decades and as the “stabbed in the back” myth functioned in German politics in the nineteen-twenties.  

They Are Creating a Myth

Ted Cruz and his colleagues know that the effort to throw out the election results will fail just as dozens of lawsuits have failed, but that failure is the point of the effort because failure will perpetuate a grievance that can be exploited in future elections. Cruz and his colleagues are not really attempting to upend the election; they are creating a political myth that may serve them well for many years.

Toward and More Just and Equitable Society: How to be an Ally in the Fight for Racial Equity

 The Two Tracks

There are two tracks that white people can follow to be allies in the fight for racial justice and equity in our society. On one track, we can support the efforts of people of color in the explicit fight for racial justice. On the other track, we can as white people work for a more just and equitable distribution of wealth and income in our society. On this track, we deal with issues that are not explicitly racial but that have racial implications.

Allies in the Explicit Fight for Racial Justice

Most writers on the subject of how we can work as allies agree that  white people should not attempt to lead the fight for racial justice but should support the efforts of people of color. As allies, we must first of all educate ourselves in the history and effects of racism in our country.  This is not simply a matter of learning facts but of changing deeply held opinions and attitudes. For many, the process of education is difficult and even painful, and it takes place over years.  As we learn, we can must share what we have learned with others.

We can in addition, offer forums in which people of color can express their concerns and their demands. We can contribute financially to the fight, and we can participate in marches and demonstrations to show our support. We can vote for political candidates of color and for those who support reforms. We can participate in multiracial groups that work to get local governments to appoint people of color to committees and commissions. We can also push the organizations to which we belong to look for ways to become more inclusive.

Working for a More Just Society

All of these things are useful, but they do not exhaust the possibilities.  We can also fight for a more just society in ways that are not explicitly antiracist but that have the effect of reducing the economic gap between white people and people of other races. People of color are much poorer on average than white people.  This relative poverty of people of color is not a matter only of people who are poor in the sense that they have very low incomes and almost no wealth. The relative poverty of people of color extends through almost all levels of our society. People of color with college degrees, professional qualifications and good jobs are paid less on average that white people with similar resumés; people of color carry heavier burdens of student debt than white people; and they have far less inherited wealth than white people. Consequently, their relative poverty reproduces itself in each generation across almost all levels of our society. The relative poverty of people of color is not itself racism, but it is an effect of racism.[i]

To mitigate this effect of racism, we need to think about ways of redistributing wealth and income in our country, and in doing so, it helps to remember that racial inequality is not the only kind of inequality that we have. We live in a society in which most of the wealth is held by a very small percentage of the people, and we can develop policies that increase the fairness of our society as a whole.

If we do that, we will also decrease the wealth gap between people of color and white people because people of color are overrepresented in the poorer levels of our society and therefore, they will benefit disproportionately from policies that redistribute wealth or income down. Thus, reducing the economic effects of racism is bound up with the task of making our society as a whole more equitable. If we do that, we will reduce the wealth gap between white people and others, and we will at the same time make most white people better off. Thus, the struggle for a just and equitable society is not exclusively a racial struggle. It is a struggle for all of us.

We Must Work on Both Tracks

As allies in the struggle against racism, we white people must work on these two parallel tracks. On one track, we support the political struggles of people of color. Such struggles might include the struggle for reparations, the struggle against police violence, the struggle for immigration reform and the struggle against environmental injustices. Elements of the struggle for prison reform also appear on this track. In those struggles, we follow the leadership of people of color.

On the second track, we struggle for a more just and equitable distribution of income and wealth in our society. Such struggles might include the struggle to raise the minimum wage, the struggle for affordable child care, the struggle for free post-secondary education, the struggle for affordable housing, and the struggle for a decent, national system of health care. Some elements of the struggle for prison reform may also appear on this track.  Here, we act independently for justice and equity for all people in our society.

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[i] William A. Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2020

The Radical Right Undermines Our Democracy for Partisan Advantage

The Radical Right is Deliberately Undermining Our Democracy for Partisan Advantage.

Mr. Trump’s claim that our presidential election was won by fraud is patently false, and it has been rejected out of hand by dozens of judges as well as several state governors. In spite of the claim’s absurdity, it has done great harm to our country because millions of Americans believe it, and as a result, they deny the legitimacy of our government and of our basic, political institutions.

Our Government Survives Because We Believe It is Legitimate

Our democracy, like any government, has not survived for two centuries on brute force alone. It has survived because most of us accord legitimacy to it and to the electoral processes by which our leaders are chosen. Our government has survived because we accept it and follow its rules most of the time. We do not actively oppose it or attempt to overthrow it. We believe that submitting to the government is right and just even when it does not act justly. We express that belief in the principle that we are a nation of laws, and that it is an obligation of a citizen to obey the laws. We believe this because we believe that our government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed just as our Declaration of Independence says that it should, and the way that “the consent of the governed” is expressed is through fair and open elections.

It is true that we also have a strong tradition of civil disobedience in which people deliberately disobey what they see as unjust laws, but even in civil disobedience, we accord legitimacy to our institutions. Thus, the civil rights demonstrators of the nineteen sixties allowed themselves to be arrested and taken to jail. They placed their trust in the legal institutions of our country. They demanded change, but they did not propose revolution.

The Claim of Fraudulent Elections Legitimizes Violence

Claiming that our elections are fraudulent shatters the consensus on which the legitimacy of our government depends and thus legitimizes violent, armed resistance. Violent resistance in the United States is a real possibility. Our country has many, organized armed groups that claim to represent the real will of the people. It is not clear how many members these groups have, but the number is estimated at several tens of thousands. Today, the groups are fragmented and have little power, but their members have shown a willingness to commit extremely violent acts and to promote violence against public officials.  If the groups were to be brought together in a national movement, they would become a real threat to our democracy.

Our Democracy May Not Survive

That is the threat presented by the actions of our outgoing president and his supporters. They threaten to turn a fragmented collection of violent groups into the violent component of an organized, national movement with central direction and millions of members. Currently, the campaign against the legitimacy of Biden’s election is the national organization, and the violent radical rightist groups that support it form the basis of the development of an organization like SA. The violent groups by themselves cannot overthrow our system because they are too small and fragmented, but if they become the violent vanguard of a national movement with millions of members, our democracy may not survive. Our democracy could die as Germany’s did in 1932. In the election of that year, the Nazi Party received more than 11 million votes, but the SA, its paramilitary wing (the brownshirts), had only 400,000 members at that time, and a few years earlier, it had been far smaller.)

The effects of the nationalization of the violent groups have already appeared in threats to the lives of election officials and elected politicians, and I fear that the movement will become more violent and more extreme. The threat of violence is already being used to maintain Trump’s control of the Republican Party and to keep Republican politicians in line. The effect may well be that even if the forms of our democratic institutions survive, they will cease to function. If the radical right denies the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s government, it may well become impossible for Republican legislators to engage in bipartisan work with Democrats, and our national government will be immobilized. We will be unable to take action against any of the serious, national problems that we face.

We must stand firm against the destruction of our democracy by the radical right and its armed gangsters.

Reducing Racial Inequity in the United States By Making Everyone’s Life Better

 We Must Reduce Racial Inequity in the Distribution of Wealth

Reducing the racial inequity in the distribution of wealth in the United States is an important task. Black people have on average a tiny fraction of the wealth and income of white people, and the difference is due largely to racist policies the history of which is exhaustively detailed by Darity and Mullen[i].  Black people today inherit less than white people do on average, and they have a harder time accumulating wealth during their lives because they are paid less on average than white people at every occupational level. This problem will not solve itself anytime soon. Some kind of action is needed.

Reducing Inequity Through Reparations

We cannot undo the racist policies of the past, but we can reduce their effects in the present by adopting policies designed to make it easier for black people to accumulate wealth. Among those policies are reparations. Reparations are cash payments or services that would be provided for black people as a way of making the wealth accumulation playing field more level in our country.  Reparations would be paid for by the federal government out of tax revenue, and a detailed and reasonable proposal for reparations has been laid out by Darity and Mullen.[ii]

Alternatives to Reparations

The moral case for reparations is unassailable, but politically, the idea has one great weakness, which is that it ignores class differences and consequently leads to the false idea that in order for black people to prosper, white people as a group must give something up.   Talking in terms of reparations leads people to think that in order to level the playing field, all white people must suffer, and of course, that generates opposition. Many white people say, “We didn’t own slaves; we didn’t redline black neighborhoods; we didn’t lynch people or terrorize them. Why should we pay?”

We can approach this problem in a different way if we remember that we live in a time of enormous inequality.  We live in a time in which the wealth gap between the richest white people and the poorest is at least as great as the gap between the median white person and the median black person. Most of the wealth of our society is owned by a small, upper class. In such a society, a graduated, progressive income tax system can guarantee that most of the money to pay for reducing the inequity in the distribution of wealth would come from people who now have substantial wealth and substantial incomes. Most white people would not suffer. In fact, they would benefit.

We can design policies that will have the effect of reducing racial inequity while also reducing class inequity. If we focus on increasing the fairness of our society generally, we will inevitably reduce the gap between black and white people because black people, being overrepresented among the poor and the working class in this country, will benefit disproportionately.

Focusing on fairness in our society in this way meets Ibram Kendi’s definition of an antiracist policy. In his book entitled, How to be an Antiracist[iii], Kendi defines a racist policy as “any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups,” and he defines an antiracist policy as “any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups.”[iv]

What then can we do to reduce unfairness in our society and thereby reduce the inequity between black and white people in the distribution of wealth?  A number of things have been proposed, and here are a few of them.

Create Public Trust Funds for All Children

William Darity and his colleagues have proposed that a publicly funded trust fund would be set up for each child that is born in the United States, and the amount in the fund would vary from $500 for children from well-to-do families to $50,000 for children from poor families. Trust funds of this kind would be especially beneficial for black children because black families have on average only about 10% of the wealth that white families have, but the funds would also benefit poor, white children.

Raise the Federal Minimum Wage to $15 or More

An article published by the Economic Policy Institute shows that raising the minimum wage would have a strong effect on the incomes of black workers, and that would increase their ability to save and build wealth. Black workers are overrepresented in minimum wage jobs, and in addition, black people are concentrated in states that have very low minimum wages. So, an increase in the minimum wage would help to reduce the wealth gap between black and white people.

Provide Publicly Supported, Affordable Child Care

The lack of affordable child care is one of our country’s largest barriers to economic equity. Affordable child care would make it possible for many women to go to work or to go to school to improve their skills and thereby increase their incomes. Affordable child care would also make it possible for working women to raise their living standards and to save money thereby increasing their wealth. Thus, affordable child care would benefit working class families of all races, but because black people are more likely than white people to be poor, black people would benefit disproportionately, and the gap between them and white people would be reduced.

Let’s Make Everyone’s Life Better

This article has described a few of the alternatives to reparations for reducing racial inequity in the distribution of wealth in the United States. They are not the only alternatives. Others might include creating a decent, national health care system, providing a reasonable supply of affordable housing or providing a guaranteed, annual income. All of these proposals have the advantage of providing an alternative to the narrative that says that any effort to improve the lot of black people must inevitably worsen the lot of white people.

We can make everyone’s life better!

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[i] William A. Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2020

[ii] Darity and Mullen, pp. 256-70.

[iii] Ibram Kendi, How to be an Antiracist, One World, New York, 2019.

[iv] Kendi, p. 18.

Woke and Conservative

 Being Woke and Conservative

How can people be “woke” and conservative?  They do it by treating racism as a personal, psychological problem rather than as a social issue. They think that the first order of business is to overcome the racism in their hearts, and this belief conveniently absolves them from a need to do anything that will really make life better for black people.

We can see this attitude in a recent article called “As A POC, I Thought I Couldn’t Possibly Be Racist (And I Was Wrong)” . Its author says,

It’s about completely upending and rewriting everything you thought you knew about how the world works — and it is terrifying. It is scary and makes you question if you ever deserved anything you worked so hard to earn. It feels as if it’s a personal attack because haven’t you also experienced prejudice — and if you’re a non-Black person of color — racism?

It’s paralyzing because you realize you are complicit.

Later, the author adds,

As a non-Black person of color, it also means examining both how we are and have been complicit in perpetuating anti-Blackness — and how anti-Blackness ultimately harms us and as Scot Nagawa wrote, is the fulcrum of white supremacy. It means dismantling a lot of cultural trauma of how we, too, are both oppressed and oppressor — as colonized and colonizer.

It looks like changing the people you follow on social media, changing the kinds of narratives and stories you read or watch, changing the artists and music you consume. It looks like quashing that very human response of discomfort and dis-ease. It looks like listening and not rushing to erase the myriad experiences of Black people — who are not a monolith.

Personal Growth Rather than Political Action

What is described here is a process of personal growth. There is nothing here about doing anything that would actually reduce the gap in wealth and well-being between black people and white people in our country. There is nothing here about providing adequate health care to black people. There is nothing about registering black people to vote. There is nothing about making sure that people who work in occupations dominated by black women are paid adequately. The reader is not even exhorted to protest against the murder of black people by the police!

What is described here is profoundly conservative because it does not demand that we confront the injustices of our society. Instead, it demands only that we purge our hearts of “anti-blackness.” It treats the fight against racism as a process of self-improvement rather than a process of social and political change that requires confrontation and conflict.

Black People See the Irony

Many black people are aware of the irony in this approach. An article entitled “When Black People are in Pain, White People Just Join Book Clubs” says,

… when things get real — really murderous, really tragic, really violent or aggressive — my white, liberal, educated friends already know what to do. What they do is read. And talk about their reading. What they do is listen. And talk about how they listened.

… white people tend to take a slow route to meaningful activism, locked in familiar patterns, seemingly uninterested in really advancing progress. Theirs is still a world of signs and signaling, where actions like joining book clubs — often based in some “meaningfully curated” readings [like] “White Fragility,” “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” “Between the World and Me,” maybe even “All About Love” — take precedence.

 

But those actions are fraught: Book clubs, for instance, are comfortable gatherings of friends who are unlikely to nudge one another to the places of discomfort that these books, at their best, demand. Who wants to damage a relationship over something as abstract and removed as racism? Learning about new perspectives and the ideas underlying them is great; wanting to discuss them among friends in safe spaces is understandable. But outside the window are people marching to the beat of a different drum.

Let’s Get to Work!

We have real problems of racial inequity in our society, and solving them should not have to wait until I and other people who are not black have purified our hearts or finished deepening our understanding. With all our inherited imperfections, we have to get to work on those problems right now. The solutions to many of them are political. They demand action and confrontation.

What can be done to get the police to stop shooting black people? What can be done to reduce the wealth and income gaps between black and white people? The answers don’t depend on the purity of my heart or the depth of my understanding. They depend on political action.

Focusing on personal growth rather than political action is easy. It is comfortable. It does not demand that we annoy our neighbors or upset our relatives, but it is ultimately a dead end. It does not solve the problems of our society or make it a more just and equitable place.

Let’s get to work!

What Should We Expect From Amy Coney Barrett?

 It now seems clear that Amy Coney Barrett will be nominated by Pres. Trump and confirmed by the Senate as a Supreme Court Justice. She has been widely hailed by evangelical Christians and other conservatives as an ideal candidate, and she has been equally widely condemned by liberals as “religious nut” who will vote to roll back decades of progress in civil rights and in health care, especially health care for women. What can we expect from her?

Abortion

Ms. Barrett is a devout Catholic, and as such, she believes that life begins at conception and that abortion is always immoral. She has said that she does not think that Roe v. Wade will be overturned but that restrictions will be enacted, especially on late-term abortions. She also believes that requiring employers to cover birth control or abortion in health care policies they provide for their employees is an infringement on the employers’ religious freedom. So, we can be confident that she will vote to restrict access to abortions as much as she can.

Health Care

On the broader question of health care, she follows her mentor Justice Scalia in believing that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. She believes that the Supreme Court decisions that found the ACA to be constitutional did so only by stretching and distorting the language of the statute beyond its plausible meaning in order to save the statute. So, she will probably find the ACA unconstitutional if she has an opportunity to do so.

I suspect, however, that the result of overturning the Affordable Care Act will not be what conservatives would like to see. Support for some kind of national health insurance program is widespread in the United States, and if the ACA is overturned, we have a fine alternative waiting in the wings: Medicare for All.  Medicare is a successful program that has been in operation for more than half a century. Its constitutionality is firmly established.  All we would have to do would be to broaden it to cover all of us instead of only those over sixty-five. We would of course have to raise the taxes that would support the program, but people who are now paying a substantial part of their incomes for private health insurance would probably come out ahead financially, and companies would no longer have to provide health insurance to their employees. So, we can expect that if the ACA is overturned, a serious effort to enact Medicare for All will follow.

Social Justice

What would Barrett’s positions be on broader questions of social justice? We do not really know, and she may vote very conservatively on such issues. However, as a devout Catholic, she may support the Church’s strong teachings on social justice. She has in fact written on this issue in connection with the Church’s opposition to the death penalty. She believes that a Catholic judge should recuse him-/herself in death penalty cases. Her strongest statement on social justice may come from the commencement address she gave at Notre Dame, where she is on the faculty. She said there that Notre Dame as a Catholic institution aspires to produce a “different kind of lawyer,” and she asked the students to think about what that might mean. She answered her question by saying,

I’m just going to identify one way in which I hope that you, as graduates of Notre Dame, will fulfill the promise of being a different kind of lawyer. And that is this: that you will always keep in mind that your legal career is but a means to an end, and as Father Jenkins told you this morning, that end is building the kingdom of God.

This statement is ambiguous. What does it mean to “build the kingdom of God?” A non-Catholic might fear plausibly that it means that Notre Dame’s graduates should promote the power of the Catholic Church in the United States. A non-Christian might fear plausibly that it means that Christianity should be promoted as an “established religion,” and that Christian teachings should have official status in the United States.

However, a devout Christian might believe that we work to build the kingdom of God by promoting the values of justice, mercy and love that Jesus and the Hebrew prophets so eloquently expressed. I belong to an organization called ESTHER-Fox Valley, and many of its members – including a number of Catholics –   are motivated by precisely this idea. Amy Barrett is a devout Christian. I do not know what she thinks, but apparently, I will have plenty of opportunity to find out. I hope that she takes seriously the social teachings of the church to which she belongs.

Tweet America Great Again?

 All Talk, No Action

Our president doesn’t believe in policy or action. He believes in tweeting and promising. The hallmark of his presidency is that he talks a lot but does very little. This is not an accident, and the reason for it is that his role is to be a front for the business Republicans. They support him because he provides camouflage for the real policies of the Republican Party, which are low taxes and reduced regulation, especially environmental regulation. 

Camouflage for Republican Policies

The Republican Party needs the camouflage that Trump provides because low taxes and reduced regulation are not terribly popular among the regular Americans who vote in presidential elections. So, the party has had to find issues that can motivate voters to support Republican candidates. Law-and-order, fear of foreigners, and abortion have served the party well by drawing millions of voters into the Republican fold.

Whip Up People but Don’t Solve Problems

These issues have attracted voters to the Republican Party, but it has had to use the issues carefully because they can continue to motivate voters only as long as they are not resolved. If we had no unrest in our cities, there would be no law-and-order issue. If we actually excluded foreigners, fear of foreigners would cease to be a motivator. If abortion became illegal, it would no longer motivate voters to vote Republican. So, the Republican strategy has been to whip up voters’ concerns about these issues but not to do anything to resolve them, and Mr. Trump has been a perfect president for this purpose. He tweets; he puffs up his chest; he blames the Democrats; but he is careful not to propose solutions.

We can see this strategy in action in Trump’s response to the current disorder in our cities. He tweets continually. He and his supporters give apocalyptic speeches in which they predict that if Democrats are elected, no one will be safe in our country. He finds photo opportunities at scenes of disorder. He praises as patriots the white people who parade with guns. What he doesn’t do is offer solutions.  He doesn’t do anything to reduce the disorder.

He doesn’t offer solutions because he doesn’t want solutions. He wants to use the issue of law-and-order to get people to vote for him, and as Kellyanne Conway said, “The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.”

If You Want Change, Vote For Change

If Trump is elected again in November, nothing will change. The disorder will continue, and Trump will continue to tweet. If you want change, vote for change! Vote for Joe Biden in November.