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.