Beauty, Leisure and Social Status

 An Unrealistic Ideal

Women in our society are subject to a great deal pressure to conform to an unrealistic ideal of beauty, and since it is almost impossible for most of them to reach that ideal, they are often uncomfortable about their appearance. Entire industries have grown up to profit from that discomfort and to sell them products that they hope will allow them to approach the ideal. We have skincare and haircare products; we have makeup; we have diets for losing weight; we have gyms with exercises for toning the thighs or for maintaining a flat abdomen.

Why do we have such an ideal, and what is the source of the pressure to measure up to it? Some feminists have claimed that the ideal comes from men. It is a product of the patriarchy, and as such, it is just one more way in which the patriarchy maintains its domination over women. However, this view is incomplete because it ignores the role of competition for social status, which is common among both men and women. A person’s appearance is an expression of her or his social status, and this is especially true of women. In the past, when few professional opportunities were open to women, their appearance expressed the social status of the men who supported them, but today, most women have jobs and even careers, and their social status is not dependent on that of their male partners. Instead, their appearance expresses their own social status.

The ideal of personal appearance that women face demands extreme slimness along with baby-soft skin. A woman is even expected to have soft skin on her heels as if she never had to walk anywhere! The ideal also demands that her hair always be perfectly arranged and that her make-up be perfectly applied. In addition, she must wear just the right, fashionable clothes along with just the right shoes and other accessories. None of this is possible for most women because it costs too much both in money and in time, So, what does the ideal really represent, and where does it come from?

The Theory of the Leisure Class

In 1899, the American economist Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class, and in it he argued that society is composed of two classes: those who work and those who live from the work of others. He called the latter class “the leisure class,” and its members have much higher social status than the members of the working class. They display their higher status by publicly consuming products that show that they do not have to work and also by engaging in activities that show that they are able to waste a lot of time. For example, upper class men in Veblen’s day carried canes, and they wore hats that they had to remove indoors. Carrying these objects left their hands unavailable to do any work, and this demonstrated that they did not need to work. Upper class women wore elaborate dresses that made it impossible for them to do any work. Upper class people at that time ate long, elaborate meals, and this showed that they could afford to waste the time that the meals required.

Much of our ideal of feminine beauty fits perfectly into this framework. In a society where cheap food is widely available and our lives are very sedentary, staying slim requires adhering to expensive diets and spending time on exercise routines to maintain muscle tone and consume calories. Living up to the ideal of baby-like skin in middle age is also extremely expensive and time-consuming. Wearing “just the right clothes” costs a lot, and women easily recognize cheap copies of expensive brands. Having perfect hair and makeup is not only expensive, it is also very time-consuming. A woman who aspires to perfect hair and makeup can easily spend an hour or two each morning “putting on her face,” and if she goes out in the evening, she can spend another hour or two getting ready for that. Very few women can spare several hours a day on doing their hair and make-up.

The fact that most women cannot measure up to the ideal is not accidental. A social hierarchy cannot exist if everyone can meet the requirements for entering the top ranks. As Gilbert and Sullivan put it, “If everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody.” A social institution cannot be exclusive if it doesn’t exclude anyone. The exclusion of the many is the price of the prestige of the few.

Pretending to Belong to the Leisure Class

The prestige can be high for those who can manage to approximate the ideal even in middle age. For example, Elizabeth Hurley, who is in her mid-fifties, receives endless prestige, envy, admiration and publicity when she poses in bikinis, but it is worth noting that she is never photographed doing the work that she must obviously do in order to continue to look the way she does at her age. Her publicity makes it seem as though the whole thing were effortless, and of course, nothing is said about the fact that the photos really serve as ads for the bikinis that are sold by her company. She is made to appear to be a member of the leisure class, and that is the crux of the matter. A woman who aspires to live up to our ideal of beauty must look as if she never had to work, and she if she can do that, she can attain the high social status that a life of leisure brings.

There is something archaic in all of this because today, the leisure class has almost disappeared. Today, most women who can afford to dress stylishly work for their money. Think for example of Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada. She believes in the ideal, and in many ways, she embodies it, but the strain that she is under shows itself in many ways. She has no time for her husband, and she routinely mistreats her employees. We see her in tears when she learns that her husband is leaving her, but we also see her telling her young assistant Andy that “Everyone wants to be us.”

Today’s women who try to live up to the ideal must in effect, pretend to be members of the leisure class. They present themselves as if they didn’t have to work, although everyone knows that they do. They adopt hair styles that minimize the time they need to spend on their hair, and they learn to do their makeup in a minimum of time. They go to yoga or Pilates classes after work. And somehow, they try to fit in time to spend with the people they love. The strain of all of this tells on them. They are tired, and they are frustrated. The source of the frustration and fatigue is the unrealism of the idea that an impractical and time-consuming appearance is an expression of high social status in a world where most women of high social status work for a living. We all know that the ideal is absurd and outdated, but it is difficult for a person to abandon it without stepping aside from the almost universal competition for social status that is a central part of life in our society.

Issues of Gender Identity are Safe

 Safe Issues for Complacent, Well-to-Do People

The politics of gender identity provide a perfect set of issues for complacent, well-to-do, middle-class liberals and radicals. The issues include questions that are currently widely debated. Who is a man? Who is a woman? Can a person be “non-binary”? Is a person’s gender identity tied to his/her anatomical structure, or is it a matter of self-concept? Is a person’s gender identity permanent, or can it change during his/her life?[i]  

These issues are safe for because progressive positions concerning gender identity do not threaten anyone’s comfortable, social position or indeed any of the basic institutions of power and wealth in our country. People with large investment portfolios or successful businesses do not need to fear that accepting non-binary gender identities would threaten them with higher taxes or reduce the value of their investments. Politicians who accept large donations from oil companies or pharmaceutical companies do not need to fear that their donors would be hurt if anatomical boys who identify themselves as girls were allowed to use girls’ bathrooms in schools. Businesses would adjust easily to making money from transgender people. In short, a middle-class liberal may safely espouse progressive positions on the issues of gender identity without taking any serious risks. Their comfortable, middle-class positions will not be threatened.

Risky Issues

Other political issues are much riskier. A serious commitment to fighting climate change would require big adjustments in our economy. People with investment portfolios would risk losing money in those changes, and some businesses would go bankrupt. A decent, national health insurance program would threaten the incomes of medical professionals and eliminate millions of jobs in insurance companies. A decent supply of affordable housing would require changes in zoning laws, and those changes would affect the value of millions of middle-class homes.  Free post-secondary education would require most middle-class people to pay higher taxes and would subject their children to competition from the lower-class students who would be able to attend our universities.  And, of course, any serious approach to racial justice would require us to act on all of these issues.

We Don’t Act on Risky Issues

We do little or nothing to about these risky issues, and in fact, we do little to make life easier or better for the majority of our people. Climate change, although it threatens us all, has become a political football. Millions of otherwise sensible people oppose any kind of national, health insurance program although our mediocre health care system is by far the most expensive in the world. Our cities are full of homeless people, and millions of families are groaning under the burden of educational debts.  

While we are failing to act to resolve such important social problems, we read  serious articles in major newspapers that discuss the question of whether or not it is ok to use “they” as a singular pronoun, and our courts deal with lawsuits over the question of whether an anatomical boy who considers himself a girl may be allowed to use the girls’ bathroom in her school.

Liberals Get to Feel Virtuous

By espousing progressive positions on issues of gender identity, liberals get to feel morally superior. They get to feel that they are espousing freedom, the ability of an individual to express his/her true nature and the creation of a truly free society. They get to feel morally superior without taking any serious risks. Their positions and their wealth are not threatened. What could be more comfortable? What could be safer?

---

[i] The politics of sexual preference are another matter, and I am excluding them from this discussion. There can be no doubt that gay and lesbian people are entitled to the same freedoms and protections as straight people. Gay and lesbian people should be able to live their lives openly without fear of retaliation or prejudice. Gay and lesbian relationships should be portrayed in movies, plays and TV shows as natural and acceptable relationships.

 

Playing With Fire: Vigilantes, the Myth of Electoral Fraud and the Myth of the Second War on Terror

 Playing With Fire

The Republicans are playing with fire as they promote ideas that can become a basis for political violence and can turn our vigilantes into terrorists. Vigilantes are common in the United States as two recent cases have shown. Kyle Rittenhouse shot three people in the belief that he was helping to uphold the law and maintain social order. Travis McMichael and two other people killed Ahmaud Arbery because they believed that he had committed a burglary.   An article in the New York Times by columnist Charles Blow suggests that actions like these fit into our long tradition of White vigilantism, a tradition that includes Bernard Goetz, who shot four Black teenagers in in New York in 1984, and George Zimmerman, who shot Trayvon Martin in 2012.

Vigilantism is Different from Terrorism

The article also describes the prolonged southern campaign of terrorism against Black people as another example of White vigilantism, but that is a mistake. The terrorist campaign waged by the Ku Lux Klan and other organizations was quite different from killings like those perpetrated by Rittenhouse, McMichael, Goetz and Zimmerman. The latter were committed by lone individuals who saw themselves as combatting crime, but none of them claimed to act to advance a political program or objective.

In contrast, the southern terrorist campaign was an organized effort to re-establish the political hegemony of the planter class in the South after the end of Reconstruction in 1877. The campaign culminated in the 1890’s, when the southern states rewrote their constitutions to establish the system of legal segregation and to prevent Black people (and many White people) from voting. After the elections of 1896, when the power of the planter class had been firmly re-established, the terrorism was continued to make sure that a cheap labor force kept working in the cotton fields. Rittenhouse, McMichael, Goetz and Zimmerman were vigilantes, but they were not terrorists because they were not parts of an organized political movement and did not act in support of a political ideology.

A Terrorist Ideology for America

Some Republican leaders and propagandists are engaged in defining and promoting a political ideology that could serve as a basis of a terrorist campaign. The ideology is a claim that our democratic institutions have become so corrupted and subverted that they no longer merit the support of the American people, and that therefore, American patriots must act to reclaim our democratic government.

The work of defining this ideology began with the effort by elements of the Republican Party to delegitimize the elections of 2020. They have created and promoted the Myth of the Stolen Election. They claim that Pres. Biden was elected by means of massive, electoral fraud and that therefore, his administration is not legitimate and should not be supported by American patriots. This idea has recently received an expanded basis in Tucker Carlson’s documentary series Patriot Purge.

Carlson claims explicitly that the United States is in the grip of what he calls “the Second War on Terror.” In that war, the techniques and attitudes that underlay Pres. Bush’s War on Terror have now been turned on American conservatives. Carlson argues that in the Second War on Terror, the FBI and the entire, American security apparatus are now devoting their efforts to hunting down and arresting Trump voters. In his view, the invasion of the Capitol on January 6 was a “false flag operation” in which agents of the FBI deliberately created the riot in order to entrap and arrest Trump voters, and he labels the death of Ashli Babbit “the Second War on Terror’s first kill.” If you think that I am exaggerating, I encourage you to log into Fox Nation and listen to the three episodes of Patriot Purge.

Carlson says that our country has already been engulfed by organized, political violence that is being used by the political left to stifle conservative dissent, and that therefore, conservatives must prepare to defend themselves. They would be foolish to place their faith in a government that is actively attempting to hunt them down and kill them. In fact, conservative patriots may have no choice but to resort to violence to protect themselves and to restore our democracy.

Vigilantes to Terrorists

Our country has millions of citizens who own guns and believe that they should use those guns to maintain law and order and to uphold our democratic values. People like Rittenhouse and McMichael have shown that they are willing and ready to act as vigilantes. All that is missing to turn such vigilantes into terrorists is a national political movement with a paramilitary wing to recruit them and to provide them with the training and organization that would convert them into fighters who are prepared to act as terrorists.

Today’s Republican Party could provide the basis for such a movement. Republican politicians bill themselves as the champions of “real” Americans, and the party promotes the Myth of the Stolen Election, which provides a ready-made justification for political violence. The same politicians have shown themselves to be willing to accept violent action as we saw in Charlottesville in 2017 and in Washington on January 6. In addition, major financial supporters of the party have shown themselves to be willing to accept the Myth of the Stolen Election along with the violent action in return for low taxes on business and reduced environmental regulation. Is it unrealistic *to imagine the formation of a national, paramilitary force to “maintain the peace” and to “protect our democracy?”

When Will We Have a Terrorist Movement?

Those who promote the Myth of the Stolen Election or the Myth of the Second War on Terror are playing with fire. We have millions of citizens with guns who already believe that they should act to enforce the law and uphold the peace.  Now, we have politicians and propagandists telling them that their country is being stolen from them by electoral fraud and by the Second War on Terror. How long will it be before a movement emerges to convert our vigilantes into terrorists?

Erinn Westbrook and the Changing Reality of Black life in America

 Erinn Westbrook is a successful, young, black actress, and her life shows us some of the ways that the position of black people in our society is changing. We need to change our ideas to keep up with the changes in our world, and we should be particularly careful to keep our stereotypes of black entertainers up to date.

The Old Reality

When I was a boy, successful black entertainers were always people who had risen from poverty through their immense talent and perseverance. Hattie McDaniel and Stepin Fetchit were condemned to play the roles of servants or comic negroes throughout their careers in Hollywood. August Wilson’s play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” shows us just how high the barriers to success were in that period. In the next generation, Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, Sidney Poitier, Louis Armstrong and others were able by the sheer force of their talent and will to weaken the barriers of racial prejudice and discrimination, and they opened the way for the black actors and musicians of our time.

The New Complexity

Today, while the barriers of racism still exist, some black people grow up in very privileged families. I recently saw an example in the Hallmark movie “Advice to Love By.” The female lead in the movie is Erinn Westbrook, and her life is illustrative of the fact that today, black people may come from a much broader range of backgrounds than in the past.

Erinn Westbrook was born in a wealthy family on Long Island and later moved to Missouri, where she lived in a community called “Town and Country”(!). She attended John Burroughs School, a private, college preparatory school and, like all of her siblings, graduated from Harvard University. Her father was the president and CEO of KRW Advisors, a consulting firm based in Tacoma, Washington. From 1997 to 2006, he was president and CEO of Millennium Digital Media, LLC, a cable and telecommunications company he co-founded.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Erinn Westbrook is not typical of black people in the United States today, but when I was born more than 80 years ago, she could not have existed at all. Her story cannot be taken to mean that institutional racism is a thing of the past, but the social context of racism today is different from what it was in the past, and we must understand the new context if we are to make further progress. We have to figure out how to make sense of a world in which on the one hand, the police can shoot black people with impunity, and on the other hand, some black people are born into the highest levels of our society. How can it be that a country that has produced Erinn Westbrook has also produced the mass incarceration of black people? Where do we go from here, and how do we get there?

Equality and Equity

 Equality Before the Law

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ….” These inspirational words, written by Thomas Jefferson, are among the basic principles of our society and our laws, but what did they mean when they were written, and why do we now worry not only about equality but also about equity?

When Jefferson wrote these words, he was referring to equality before the law. He lived in a time when all people were not equal before the English law. Members of the English aristocracy had rights and privileges that ordinary people did not have. They were hereditary members of Parliament, and they controlled the country and its laws. They used their privileges to protect their ownership of most of the wealth of the country.  They claimed that this situation was right and just because it was divinely ordained. People said, “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate.”

Jefferson declared that this kind of inequality was wrong. It was contrary to the laws of “Nature and Nature’s God.” In America, he said, everyone would be equal before the law.  Unfortunately, this lofty principle was not applied consistently. In Jefferson’s time, black people were not equal, and neither were women or Native Americans. Those inequalities had consequences that have reverberated throughout our history, which has been marked by continual struggles to obtain legal equality.

Equality of Opportunity

The struggle for legal equality has been and continues to be important to us because it is a condition of equality of opportunity, which is an important American value.  We believe that all people should have equal opportunities to prosper in life. Moreover, for us, equality of opportunity justifies the inequality of wealth that is an obvious feature of our society. It is acceptable to us that some people should be rich and others poor if we all have the same opportunity be rich, and we know that equality of opportunity requires at least legal equality.

Equity

Unfortunately, legal equality by itself cannot really guarantee equality of opportunity because people are born into unequal circumstances. Some people are born to wealth, and others are not. Some people face barriers created by both historical and contemporary racial discrimination while others do not.

For example, it has been well-documented that on average, black families in the United States have only about one eighth of the wealth of white families. This means that on average, black children face a harder struggle than white children to obtain professional or technical training. To overcome this handicap, black people end up carrying a heavier burden of student debt than white people do on average, and that burden becomes a drag on their economic prospects throughout their lives. Thus, the race for economic prosperity is not really fair, or as we now say, it is not equitable. That is why we worry today about equity as well as equality.

Equity and Real Equality of Opportunity

If we want our country to be one in which all people really have equality of opportunity, we must address the sources of inequity in our society. As far as we can, we must remove the practical, non-legal barriers that deny equality of opportunity to millions of people. We will never eliminate all of the inequalities of wealth or race but we can make them less important than they are today.

For example, we could make post-secondary education free for all students so that people who have not been born into wealth would not have to take on heavy debts to earn technical or professional certifications.  We could provide affordable child-care so that families who are poor would not need to impoverish themselves still further to provide for their children. We could develop a decent, national health care system so that no one needs to avoid taking her children to the doctor when they are sick.

These kinds of services – education, child care, health care – would not be charity. They would help people to help themselves. They would increase the equity of our society, and they would move us a little closer to real equality of opportunity.

Capitalist Dominion and the Culture Wars

 Cultural Issues in American Politics.

Anyone observing the United States could be forgiven for thinking that cultural issues are important movers in American politics, but such an observer would be wrong.  It is true that cultural issues generate a lot of heat and that it is not difficult to gin up a political movement based on people’s fears of cultural change. However, fears of cultural change do not by themselves make a political movement. In order to turn vaguely felt fears into an organized, political movement, money is needed. Lots of money. If we want to understand why cultural issues play such a large role in our politics, we must ask ourselves who provides the money, and why they do it? Who benefits? That is the question.

The Capitalist Class Benefits

The answer is simple. The members of the capitalist class benefit. They benefit because they have been able to use cultural fears to divide the working class politically along cultural lines. Some very wealthy people have understood that deliberately stimulating and nourishing cultural fears can effectively divide the working class along cultural lines and prevent its members from acting in their own interest. This is important because if the working class acted in its own interest, taxes would rise and business would be more heavily regulated.

Is there a danger that our country might opt for a real, tax-supported national health care system? That danger can be averted if working people can be induced to vote their fears instead of their interests. Is there a danger that our citizens might opt for a system of post-secondary education that did not leave millions of people hopelessly indebted? That danger, too, can be averted if people can be persuaded to vote their fears.

Wealthy People Fund the Culture Wars

So, people of great wealth provide the money that is needed to turn people’s vague prejudices and fears into focused, political movements. The money pays for the production of the necessary propaganda. The money pays for rallies and marches. It pays for the campaigns of political candidates who can be counted on to know which side of their bread is buttered, as we can see in NARAL’S. “The Insidious Power of the Anti-Choice Movement,” which documents the growth and reach of the anti-abortion movement and the sources of its support.

The Republican Party and the Culture Wars

That is how today’s Republican Party works: political movements are ginned up to exploit people’s fears and garner votes for Republican candidates. When they have been elected, they vote against a decent national health care program; they vote against relieving the burden of student debt; they vote against any regulation of business that might interfere with profits; they vote against doing anything to combat climate change; they vote for low taxes and other “business friendly” policies. They do little for the people who elected them, but their voters don’t notice that as long as their attention is focused on cultural issues. Thus, a political movement that caters to cultural fears keeps the government firmly in the hands of the capitalist class.

We can see this process in operation in the work of Donor Advised Funds like the National Christian Foundation. The foundation takes in gifts in the form of cash, stocks, bonds, and other income producing assets, and it makes grants to various conservative, political causes including anti-abortion groups and anti LGBTQ groups. Why is the NCF so well funded? Are we to believe that wealthy donors lie awake at night agonizing over the fate of the nation’s fetuses or that they are so disgusted by the thought of homosexuality that they donate tens of millions of dollars to the fight against gay marriage? Of course not. They donate such sums because they have big interests of their own at stake. They know that the Republican Party can never garner millions of working-class votes by campaigning on its real legislative program, but it can garner those votes from working people who can be persuaded to vote their cultural fears.

We can also see this process at work in this story from the Washington Post that tells us about the $5.7 million that were raised to fund the manual recount of the 2020 election votes in Maricopa County, Arizona. Why did wealthy people donate big amounts to this cause? No one ever thought that the recount would change the national results of the election even if massive fraud were uncovered in Maricopa County. So, why did a few rich people fund the recount?

They did it to nourish the myth that the election had been stolen. The recount itself never mattered, but the widespread belief in the stolen election does matter because it divides the working class. The myth will be used in future elections to elect Republican candidates and prevent taxes from being raised and business from being regulated in the public interest.

Keeping the Working Class Divided

Thus, the culture wars, like the politics of racism, should not be seen merely as the expression of American fears and prejudices. In order to understand them and their role in our country’s politics, we must see them in the context of the class struggle for control of our government. The culture wars are funded and nourished by wealthy Americans to prevent the election of politicians who would vote for programs that would require taxes to be raised or business profits to be limited by regulations. The culture wars are funded to keep our government firmly in the hands of the wealthy.

What is the Fight Over Voting Rights and Gerrymandering About?

The Fight is About Class, Not Race 

The fight over voting rights and gerrymandering seems to be about race, but it is really about class. It is about preserving the control of our government by great wealth. It is about sacrificing the well-being of working Americans of all races to preserve the wealth and power of a few extremely wealthy people.

The Fight is About Preserving Republican Power

The Republicans are pushing gerrymandering and  restrictions on voting rights because they believe that, without such restrictions, they will not be able to win national elections in the future. So, we can see what this fight is about by examining the Republicans’ legislative priorities. The record shows that Republicans want low taxes and minimal regulation of business. Republican candidates run on cultural issues like abortion or gun rights that animate elements of our working class, but once in office, the Republicans do very little about those issues. Instead, they pass a big tax cut, gut environmental regulations and oppose programs like affordable child care, free post-secondary education or national health care that might actually benefit the working-class voters who put them in office.

The Fight is About the Well-Being of Ordinary Americans of All Races

Why do Republicans oppose such programs? They do it because they know that such programs will have to be paid for by raising taxes and by (choke, gasp) collecting the taxes that are owed. Republicans oppose such programs because they know that much of the money to pay for them will come out of the pockets of the party’s wealthy donors who use their power to make sure that the party’s priorities continue to be low taxes and minimal regulation of business.

The fight over voting rights is really about preserving the wealth and power of wealthy donors to the Republican Party. The fight is really about preventing our country from enacting programs to benefit members of the working class of all races.  The fight over voting rights is really about the well-being of ordinary Americans of all races. Do we want to have a decent national health care system? Do we want to preserve our Social Security system? Do we want a system in which young people are not saddled with crushing educational debts? Do we want affordable child care? If we want any of these things, we have to fight to preserve everyone’s right to vote. That is what this fight is about.

What Should We Do About the Tulsa Massacre?

The Memory of Tulsa Should Drive Us to Act

Recently, the news has been full of stories about the horrendous massacre and destructive race riot that occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma 100 years ago this weekend. That event was among the worst and most shocking in the long, tragic history of racism in the United States. In a prosperous and peaceful neighborhood, hundreds of black people were killed, and millions of dollars of property was destroyed by a white mob. Families saw their children killed. Family wealth that was the product of years of struggle and labor was wiped out in a few hours.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should remember these tragic events, but we should also remember the words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address because they apply to us now just as much as they applied to his audience in 1863:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us … that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.

The work of building a just and equitable society in our country is far from finished. There is much still remaining to be done. The racism of the past has produced inequities in the present. We cannot go back and undo what was done in the past, but we can work to reduce or eliminate the inequities of the present, and remembering the events of Memorial Day Weekend in 1921 should reinforce our commitment to that task.

What Should We Do?

In his book, How to be an Antiracist by Ibram Kendi shows us what that means.  He tells us that the job of an anti-racist is to reduce and ultimately eliminate “racial inequity.” And what is racial inequity?

Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing. Here’s an example of racial inequity: 71 percent of white families lived in owner-occupied homes in 2014, compared to … 41 percent of black families.

The job of antiracists is to work to eliminate inequities of this kind. Two approaches to this work have been proposed. One is to focus on reparations. In this approach, payments are made to black people to counterbalance the effects of past racism. Pres. Biden’s proposal for payments to black farmers is an example of this approach. Ta-Nehisi Coates discussion of reparations for black Americans is a broader example.

The other approach to eliminating the inequities of our society is to focus on broad, redistributive policies that are not directed explicitly at black people but that reduce the racial wealth gap because black people fall disproportionately into the groups that are benefited by such policies. William Darity’s proposal for a publicly funded trust fund for every child is an example. Forgiving students’ debts is another example. It would reduce the racial wealth gap because black people carry more debt on average than white people do.

Both of these approaches are valid, and each of them has its place. Both require action, and we must act. As we remember the horror of the Tulsa Massacre, we must find in it a motive to act to reduce the inequities of our own time. It is not enough for us white people to recognize and accept that our prosperity has been built in part on such events. It is not enough to be “woke.” Ringing our hands and bowing our heads in shame will not do anything to reduce the wealth gap between black and white Americans. Purging our hearts of the sin of racism is good, but it is not the goal. The goal is to build a just society.

To do that, we must act, and our actions must be political. We must support policies like those mentioned above that deal with the inequities of our time. We cannot erase the injustices of our past, but we can make our society more just now, and that is what we must do as we remember the Tulsa Massacre.

Saving the Planet and Social Justice: the Logic of President Biden's Plan

 Is There a Connection?

How is the fight to against climate change connected to the fight for social justice? The answer is not obvious, and indeed, the two could conflict with one another. After all, if climate change is truly a threat to the survival of our society and economy, perhaps we shouldn’t worry right now about social justice. Perhaps, we should focus all of our attention on saving ourselves from the imminent destruction that Greta Thunberg and others have been warning us about, and later, when we have the leisure to do so, we can worry about making our society better.

From this point of view, the coal miners in West Virginia and the oil field workers in Louisiana are collateral damage in the fight to save our planet. It is unfortunate that they should suffer, but their suffering is for the greater good. By the same token, this is not the time to be worrying about racial justice. Of course, black lives matter, but right now, we cannot divert resources from saving the planet to retraining our police. Of course, we need to provide a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants, but right now, we have more pressing problems to deal with.

Why is this wrong? Why do we need to worry about social justice now? Why can’t we put off the difficult and frustrating fight for social justice until we have saved our planet?

Maybe, We Need a Revolution

There are two ways to answer this question. One is based on a fundamental critique of our society. That critique says that our environmental problems are merely the latest symptoms of our real problem, which is that our capitalist system is so exploitative at its heart that it can never provide either social justice or a solution to the problem of climate change. Holders of this view say that capitalism is based on an ideology of greed and short-term thinking, and unless we can replace capitalism with a better system, we are kidding ourselves if with think that we can save our planet. In effect, this approach says that we cannot solve the problem of climate change without a revolution.

Maybe, We Need a Coalition

The second answer to the question of why we should worry now about social justice accepts our system as it is and focuses on the need to build a political coalition to support solving the climate change problem. The fight to save our planet will demand much of our political system. Big changes will be required, and they cannot take place unless they are demanded by a strong political coalition. From this point of view, the problem is to design a solution to the climate problem that not only solves the problem but also provides immediate, tangible benefits to all of the groups that join the coalition. In effect, this approach says that we can save our planet without a revolution but only if we do it in a way that increases social justice in our society.

President Biden's American Jobs Plan

The recognition of the need to build a coalition underlies Pres. Biden’s American Jobs Plan.  He has presented it not as a solution to the climate crisis but as a plan to stimulate the American economy. Under this plan, thousands of companies will profit; millions of workers will get good jobs; clean water will be provided to communities now suffering from water that is contaminated with lead; women and minorities will benefit from increased wages in home health services; displaced workers, members of minority groups and other workers will benefit from free post-secondary education; and oh, by the way, we will mitigate the effects of climate change by improving public transportation, supporting the development of electric cars and expanding the production and transmission of green energy.

I don’t know whether Pres. Biden’s effort will succeed, but I believe that he is right in principle. We cannot separate the fight to save our planet from the fight for social justice. We cannot save our planet unless we do so in a way that increases social justice by providing benefits for most of our people.

This is Our Chance

 We Can Overcome Hyper-Partisanship

We have a chance now to overcome the extreme partisanship that has poisoned our politics for decades. We can turn away from blind partisanship and toward a practical politics that is focused on doing what is right for the American people. Congress has recently passed the American Rescue Plan (ARP), which is very popular among the American people. It is of course supported by most Democrats, but it is also supported by a majority of Republicans according to a recent survey. In spite of the act’s popularity among Republican voters, it passed Congress without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate. Why did Republican senators and representatives vote against a bill that was so popular with their constituents?

The Radical Right is Vulnerable

The answer is that Republican politicians are afraid that if they break partisan ranks to vote for a measure like the American Rescue Plan, their party’s radical right will mount primary challenges against them. It doesn’t matter that the ARP is supported by most Republican voters. As long as it is supported by Democrats, it will be opposed by the radical rightists, and they will keep the Republican legislators in line. Now, however, the radical rightists are vulnerable. They have found no coherent way to oppose the American Rescue Plan, and their only hope is to divert our attention to other issues.

Keep the Focus on the American Rescue Plan

We must do all we can to prevent that. We must make sure that the ARP remains front and center in our political conversations. If we can do that, we may be able to overcome the barrier of hyper-partisanship. Pres. Biden has embarked on a national speaking tour to explain the ARP to the American People and to build on their support for it. If he is successful, he may be able to open a space in which Republican politicians can again act in the interest of their constituents instead of bending to the will of the radical right, which has always been a minority of Republicans.

We must do our part. We must engage in conversations with our friends and neighbors about the contents of the ARP. We must help them to see the ways in which in benefits them. We must not allow the radical right to divert attention to other issues, to personalities or to purely partisan matters. If we want our country to return to a reasonable politics of interest and compassion, this is our chance. If we want to turn away from hyper-partisanship, this is our chance.

Caste and Class in American Politics

A Masterful Work

Isabel Wilkerson’s recent book Caste is a masterful exploration of the meaning and ubiquity of caste divisions in American society. The author’s comparisons of our caste system with those of India and Nazi Germany are telling and accurate. Her descriptions of the horrors that have been visited on members of her caste are harrowing, and her recounting of her own experiences in pushing the boundaries of caste are authoritative in the way that only first-person experiences can be.

An Incomplete View of the Role of Caste

However, her discussion of the role of caste in American politics is incomplete because it fails to take account of the role of money and of the people who provide it. In Wilkerson’s view, issues of caste are the main drivers of political divisions in American politics. She sees the contemporary Republican Party as driven by the status anxiety of the members of the dominant caste. Speaking of the presidential campaign of 2016, she says (p. 6)

The campaign had become … an existential fight for primacy in a country whose demographics had been shifting beneath us all. People whose … ancestry traced back to Europe had been the dominant racial caste in an unspoken hierarchy since before the beginning of the republic. But …, in the summer of 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau announced its projection that by 2042, … whites would no longer be the majority ….

Then, that fall … an African-American … was elected president of the United States.

The effect of all this was to produce anger and anxiety among working class white people. As Wilkerson puts it (p. 183),

If a lower-caste person manages actually to rise above an upper-caste person, the natural human response from someone weaned on their caste’s inherent superiority is to perceive a threat to their existence, a heightened sense of unease, of displacement, of fear for their very survival. “If the things that I have believed are not true, then might I not be who I thought I was?” The disaffection is more than economic. The malaise is spiritual, psychological, emotional. Who are you if there is no one to be better than?

For Wilkerson, this spiritual malaise and insecurity accounts for the strength of working-class support for Donald Trump in 2016 and for the victory of the Republican Party that year. She is correct as far as she goes, but her explanation is incomplete because it fails to account for the financial cost of turning widespread malaise and insecurity into a political movement.

It Takes Money and the Support of People Who Have It

The rallies that Trump held during his campaign had to be paid for. The propaganda that links “welfare” to the "laziness" of black people has to be paid for. The propaganda telling us that Mexican immigrants are gangsters and rapists has to be paid for. The people who spread racist propaganda on Fox News and talk radio earn six-figure salaries, and they have to be paid. 

The money for these things comes from people at the top of our society. The Koch brothers’ political action committee has contributed millions of dollars to Republican political campaigns, and the Kochs along with other wealthy people and corporations have also made large donations to the American Legislative Exchange Council. Betsy DeVos’s family has made millions of dollars of contributions to Republican political campaigns. Their contributions and the contributions of others like them supported the effort to build a movement based on racist fears. Why do people like these donate money to support such a movement?

Why Rich People Support Racist Politics

They don’t do it because of status anxiety. It is ludicrous to say that the likes of Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos or Rupert Murdoch act politically because they are suffering from status anxiety. Great wealth always confers high social status in the United States. Rich people are admired for their wealth. Our white billionaires are not threatened by the election of Barack Obama as president or by the fact that Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry are also billionaires. So, why do American billionaires support racist politics?

The short answer is that they do it to keep wages low, taxes low, the working class docile and government safely in the hands of people like themselves. They do it to divide the working class and thereby keep its members from joining together to act in their own interest.

Class and Caste in India and Nazi Germany

This was true in the past as it is today. Let us look at the cases that Wilkerson uses for comparison to our caste system. She mentions the Indian caste system. In Indian villages, the major landowners belong to the higher castes, while the tenant farmers and landless laborers are lower caste people and Dalits. Thus, the caste system bolsters the control that the wealthy exercise over the lives of the poor. It prevents the Shudras (members of the lowest caste) from allying with the Dalits (untouchables). The system provides divine legitimation for an oppressive class system.

Wilkerson also compares our system to that of Nazi Germany. In understanding the rise of the Nazi Party, we should remember that in the early nineteen thirties, the German capitalists were desperately afraid of communism. A successful communist revolution had taken place just next door in Russia only a few years earlier, and the German communist party was large and well organized. German capitalists supported Hitler and the Nazis as a bulwark against communism. For the wealthy, the Nazi caste system was a price they were willing to pay to maintain their wealth and power.

Caste and Class in American Politics

The same kinds of motives underlie upper class support of racist politics in American History. In the late nineteenth century, the planter class in the South promoted racial divisions not only to keep black people in line but also to prevent poor black and white people from joining together in the populist movement of that period. The restrictions on voting that were put in place eliminated millions of poor white voters along with the black voters, and the planters maintained their control in a region where they were a small minority of the total, white population.

Racial divisions in the United States have also been exploited to break strikes and to prevent the development of labor unions in many parts of our country, and racial divisions continue to be used that way today.

People like Robert Koch, Betsy DeVos or Rupert Murdoch exploit the racial fears of the working class in order to maintain their own wealth and power. They support racist politics to bring in votes for candidates who will pass right-to-work laws, oppose higher taxes, prevent environmental regulation and prevent the creation of a decent national health care system. They support racist politics not because they are worried about their caste positions but to advance their economic agendas. Rupert Murdoch has even turned supporting racist politics into a profitable business in Fox News.

We can see the outcome of this kind of cynical politics in the legislative actions of the Trump administration. It did very little to advance a racist agenda, but it succeeded in passing an enormous tax cut that benefits mainly rich people, and it rolled back many environmental regulations. The administration also succeeded in appointing judges who will limit voting rights in order to maintain the power of the rich. Above all, the racist politics of the Republican Party kept the members of the working class from getting together to advance their shared interests.

Isabel Wilkerson is right when she says that caste plays a huge role in American politics, but the Republican political movement based on caste did not spring spontaneously from the soil of American culture and history.  It cannot be explained solely as an expression of the American caste system. The movement was created and nurtured deliberately and cynically to split the working class and to prevent the emergence of a strong, working class political movement dedicated to improving life for all Americans and not just for the wealthy few.

Ibram Kendi is not Robin DiAngelo

 DiAngelo's Approach is Conservative

White people in America often confront racism in a conservative way by treating the confrontation as an occasion for personal growth rather than social conflict. One source of this attitude is Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility, which I have argued is a profoundly conservative book because it leads its readers to treat racism as a private sin rather than a social issue just as popular, Protestantism has frequently done. I said,

Protestant Christianity generally focuses on salvation from sin through faith in Jesus Christ, but what is sin?  We can divide sins into two categories. There are public sins like oppression of the poor or corruption in public business, and there are private sins like fornication, gambling or drinking. American Protestantism has recognized both, but popular Protestant religiosity has focused much more on private sin than on public sin. Those like the 19^th century abolitionists who have insisted on social justice have faced widespread opposition from religious groups. 

 

The focus on private sin encourages individuals to work for personal development, self-understanding, psychological growth and repentance rather than to engage in social action, and White Fragility fits neatly into this tradition.  Just as Protestantism insists that sin is the inescapable condition of mankind, so White Fragility insists that racism is the inescapable condition of our society. Just as Protestantism says that we should look into our hearts, find the sin there and turn away from it, so, White Fragility says that we should look into our hearts, find the racism there and turn away from it. In both cases, “salvation” comes from personal improvement, not from social action.

 

Kendi is Different

How to be an Antiracist by Ibram Kendi is quite different. Kendi insists that racism begins with racist policies that are adopted out of economic or political self-interest. Racist ideas and attitudes are developed and promulgated later to justify the policies. Moreover, Kendi says that changes in attitudes follow rather than precede changes in policies. Therefore, antiracists work directly to change policies. They do not worry much about what is in people’s hearts, because changes in beliefs and attitudes follow policy changes.

What is a “racist policy” in Kendi’s view? He says,

A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations and guidelines that govern people.

Racist policies may exist at any level of society. For example, “redlining” was a racist policy that existed at a societal level and was supported by major political and economic institutions, but racist policies may also be local. For example, a private business in a particular community might recruit its managers from among members of the church to which the owner of the business belongs. Since churches in our society are highly segregated by race, the effect would be to exclude anyone who is not of the same race as the owner.

Then, there are subtle, cultural “policies” that can have the effect of making people from a different culture uncomfortable in a certain group.  For example, an organization’s members might talk to one another in the style of a certain social class, and that might make people of a different social class feel uncomfortable or unwelcome.

Kendi Demands Political Action

Such local practices might be characterized as racist policies, but they are not the focus of Kendi’s interest. Kendi is interested in the policies that create “racial inequity,” which he defines as follows,

Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing. Here’s an example of racial inequity: 71 percent of white families lived in owner-occupied homes in 2014, compared to … 41 percent of black families.

We can see here that Kendi is interested mainly in policies like redlining that have the effect of creating substantial racial inequity. In his view, the job of antiracists is to work to eliminate that inequity. Thus, antiracism for Kendi is fundamentally political. It demands social struggle and political action. However, because of the breadth of Kendi’s definition of “policy,” it is possible for his readers to avoid political action and focus instead on changing their own, individual behavior and on changing the processes in the local organizations to which they belong. People taking this approach can work on “inclusion” rather than equity. This approach is convenient because it avoids social conflict, and in addition it fits well with the ideas advanced in White Fragility. Racism becomes again a private rather than a public sin, and in this reading the book demands not political struggle but personal growth.

I think, however, that this approach misreads Kendi’s intent. Ibram Kendi is not Robin DiAngelo, and How to be an Antiracist is not White Fragility. To be antiracists in Kendi’s sense, we must really support policies that reduce the gap that Kendi calls “racial inequity.” Being more “inclusive” is not enough.

Why is Watching Hallmark Movies Like Going to Church?

Going to Church

People who go to “church” regularly receive the satisfaction of having their identities as well as their moral and institutional commitments confirmed. I use the word “church” here as a shorthand for “religious services,” and what I have to say applies equally well to services in synagogues, mosques or temples. 

The confirmation that churchgoers receive comes both from the form of the service and from its content. A church service has a standard form, and those who attend regularly know it well. Typically, there is a ceremonial beginning, which may be an opening blessing. Then, there is a series of prayers that affirm the core beliefs and values of the church’s religious denomination. There is usually a reading from a religious text, and the reading is followed by a sermon that expounds on the meaning of the text. Finally, there is a closing blessing. At regular points during the service, there may be music. In some churches, the music consists of songs sung by the congregation, and it may also include instrumental accompaniment.

The familiar form of the service envelops the congregants. As they repeat familiar words and sing familiar songs, they feel at home among people like them in a place that is theirs. The unchanging form of the service gives them identity and belonging. In a changing and uncertain world, it gives them stability.

The content of the service supplements the form. The words affirm traditional beliefs and values, and in the context of the service, each congregant reaffirms his/her commitment to them. The congregant does this even though he/she may in fact have serious doubts about their validity. This is hypocritical if you like, but it is very human. It gives the congregants a sense of sharing a tradition with deep roots in the past. It tells them who they are.

A religious service also has a “happy ending.” Our religions tell us that the world is ultimately a just place ruled by a just God or perhaps by an impersonal karma. People will get what they deserve. The good will surely be rewarded, and the bad will be punished. The moral books will be balanced in an afterlife, in what Judaism calls “the world to come,” or in a subsequent life for those who believe in reincarnation. Of course, many churchgoers doubt the truth of such teachings, but they suspend their disbelief just as playgoers enter into the spirit of a play by suspending their disbelief in its reality.

Watching Hallmark

Watching a Hallmark movie is a similar kind of experience. The movie has a formulaic plot with standard characters. It takes place in a familiar setting. People who watch Hallmark movies regularly know exactly what to expect. Just as in a familiar religious service, they are enveloped in a familiar environment in which they can feel at home. They know that they are sharing the experience with many other people, and that gives them a sense of belonging and community.

Hallmark movies, like religious services, affirm traditional values: family, home, romantic love, rural living, second chances. During the movie, the viewer accepts those values even though he/she may not really believe in them. A person firmly committed to a busy career in a big city can, for a moment, believe that life in a small town in the Rocky Mountains is more authentic and more humane. A person going through his/her second divorce can for a moment believe that his/her true love is waiting somewhere. Finally, a Hallmark movie always has a happy ending. As the characters often say, “Things have a way of working themselves out.” The lovers find each other; the conflicts are resolved; true love wins out; and the audience turns off the TV feeling good about themselves and about the world.

A Fake Issue

A Fine Example of a Fake Issue 

The current uproar over the stopping of trading in the stock of the company Gamestop is a beautiful example of a fake issue in American politics. A fake issue is an issue that gives politicians an opportunity to express intense moral outrage without having to do anything to improve the lives of Americans. This is a good example of a fake issue. Speeches will be made; outrage is being expressed on Facebook; hearings will be held; maybe, a new regulation will be enacted; but the lives of most Americans will be unaffected, and the regulation, being badly thought out, will turn out to be a source of trouble.

Members of both parties are now bloviating that the stopping of trading the stock of Gamestop is yet another a case of the big guys on Wall Street stepping on the little guys. That much may well be true, but this relatively minor action is being compared to the decision in 2009 to rescue the big banks but not the homeowners who lost their homes. The day traders who conspired to drive up the price of Gamestop are said to have been motivated not merely by greed but by populist anger at a system that is rigged against them. Their anger at being denied a chance to make more money is now alleged to be like the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Members of both parties in Congress – including Ted Cruz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – have jumped on the issue and are calling for hearings. The attorney general of Texas is calling for an investigation into Robinhood, the on-line app that halted the trading.

Take a Deep Breath

Take a deep breath. There cannot have been more than a few hundred day-traders trying to buy shares of Gamestop when the trading was halted. This is not a mass movement. In any case, brokers frequently halt trading in a stock if it seems to be running away with the market. The issue will not affect most of us in any way.  Only 55% of Americans own any stocks, and among those who do, the majority own them in mutual funds in retirement accounts. Very few people are day-traders, and trading or investing in stocks is not an altruistic activity. This is a fake issue.

We have plenty of real issues to occupy our attention: national health care, free post-secondary education, affordable child care, global warming and of course, the pandemic. We could worry about saving Social Security or about fixing our immigration system. Most politicians try to avoid discussing these issues because they come with risks for political risks. Taking a position on any of these issues can end up committing a politician to action that alienates some voters.  Fake issues are much safer, and politicians love them.

So, enjoy the political spectacle, but don’t allow moral outrage to rob you of sleep.

A Farcical End to a Farcical Presidency

 A Farcical Presidency

Last week’s insurrection was a farce. It was a deadly farce but a farce nevertheless, and as such, it was a fitting end to a farcical presidency. Farce and fakery have been the hallmarks of this presidency. It has been entirely consumed by the president’s image.  His farce has served as a curtain behind which the Republican Party has carried on business as usual, which has included tax cuts for the very rich and elimination of environmental regulations.

When Mr. Trump was elected, he claimed to represent the voiceless “forgotten people” in our society. He claimed that he would return the people’s government to them, but he never pursued or even defined policies to benefit the “forgotten people.” The signature policy achievements of his administration have been passing a big tax cut for the very rich, building a small piece of a wall on the Mexican border and moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. None of these provide any benefit for our “forgotten people.” They serve only to bring votes and money to the Republican Party.

Trump’s Farcical Use of the Media

We can see Mr. Trump’s fakery and his successful use of farce in his treatment of the media. He repeatedly claimed that the mainstream media published only “fake news,” and he claimed that people who wanted to know the truth should listen to him.  His effort to discredit the media was quite successful, and millions of people believe what he says to this day.

He might have used the power that the success of his campaign to discredit the media gave him to shape public opinion on serious issues. If he had not been a complete fake, he would have used his power to propose a program of legislation to benefit the people who put their trust in him. In fact, he did no such thing. He never proposed anything to benefit the “forgotten people."

He used his enormous media presence only to flatter his ego and attack his enemies. His populism was entirely fake and he conducted a political farce to the applause of his supporters and of the mainstream media who found themselves utterly captivated by his performance. He acted like a small boy who makes a lot of noise not because he expects to achieve anything useful by it but only to get people to pay attention to him.

Discrediting the Election

During 2020, Mr. Trump continually and loudly worked to discredit the election. He claimed that it would be and was a fraud. He brought dozens of legal cases to overturn the results of the election, but he did so in a way that was almost guaranteed to fail because he had no evidence to present. He tried to pack the courts in the hope that they would support him, but he forgot that prominent, conservative judges often have a strong commitment to upholding the Constitution. Again, the whole thing was never really designed to succeed. It was Mr. Trump’s standard political farce, which kept the national attention focused on him.

Unfortunately, there were millions of people who took the farce seriously. They believed what he said, and as a result, they believe today that our next president was not legitimately elected. Thus, serious damage has been done to our democracy and to our country, and the Republican Party, which also treated Trump’s farce serious bears considerable responsibility for the damage that has been done.

A Fitting End

The events of January 6 were a fitting coda to Trump’s four-year farce. He gave a speech to stimulate an insurrection with the ostensible purpose of preventing the certification of the electoral results by Congress, but there was never any chance that the insurrection would succeed.  The military did not support it; representatives of our ruling class immediately distanced themselves from it; the judges who might have legitimized the insurrection had already shown that they were not inclined to do so. The poor saps who were the foot soldiers of the farcical insurrection are now being rounded up and arrested. They will end up paying the price for it, while Mr. Trump and his Republican enablers will go free.  The insurrection itself was a typical Trump event: it was noisy; it was dirty; it was crowded; thousands of people cheered wildly; but nothing of substance was achieved. The farcical presidency came to a farcical end.

Should We Expect More Terrorism from the Radical Right?

 The Terrorism of the Weak

The short answer is, “Yes, we should expect more terrorism.” Terrorism is a tool adopted by people who feel that they have no other way to be heard or acknowledged by the political system under which they live. Terrorist acts are committed by people who feel that they face a political system of overwhelming strength that refuses to accept the legitimacy of their cause. The radical right feels that way as we can see from the popularity of the myth that last November’s election was fraudulently stolen from Mr. Trump.

Terrorism may take various forms. One them is the assassination of political leaders.  The most famous political assassination in modern times is the surely the killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which touched off the First World War. A famous American example is the killing of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Terrorism may also include killing of journalists like the twelve who were killed at the office of Charlie Hebdo in Paris in 2015. Terrorism may also include the destruction of buildings or monuments or the killing of random people by bombings or shootings. The killing of more than 100 people at the Bataclan Theater in Paris in 2015 is a well-known example.

Elite Terrorism

An entirely different kind of terrorism may be used by members of an elite that is struggling to maintain its position. Such terrorism is different from the terrorism of the weak. Elite terrorism is better organized, more sustained and much more deadly. The terrorist campaign unleashed against black people in the South after the end of Reconstruction in 1877 is an example. The campaign went on for decades, and it included lynchings, burnings, rapes and whippings. It included actions by private individuals, by law enforcement agents and by mobs. It even involved the destruction of whole communities. Thousands of innocent black people were killed, and millions moved out of the South to northern cities.  I do not think that we will see this kind of terrorism in our country in the immediate future. Our elites are very secure. They will not feel the need to terrorize us.

The Terrorism of the Weak in America

The extreme right in America has frequently employed the terrorism of the weak in recent years. During the Civil Rights Movement, we had the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, and in 1995, we had  the Oklahoma City bombing. More recently, we saw the murder of children at a church in South Carolina,  the murder of Jews at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, and the murder of a black man in Kenosha only last year.

There Will be More Terrorism

Should we expect the use of this kind of terrorism to increase? I think that the answer is “Yes.” Today, the members of the radical right see themselves in a position of weakness in confrontation with a powerful system. The myth of the stolen election in 2020 tells them that our allegedly democratic elections are controlled by a shadowy elite, which is determined to use fraud to deny electoral victories to the political right.

Mass actions have also failed them. The recent invasion of the Capitol in Washington was dramatic but failed to produce any long-lasting result. The takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 1916 was similarly ineffective. From the radical right’s point of view, it may have no alternative but terrorism.

So, we should prepare ourselves for a difficult time. The radical right is very well armed, and its members are desperate. The internet facilitates the organization of desperate acts. Our law enforcement agencies must prepare themselves for repeated acts of terrorism by the radical right. The lack of preparedness that we saw recently at the Capitol must not be repeated.

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.