2-28-06, 8:50 am
Author's note: The following is a revised version of the text of a lecture I gave on February 22, 2006 at College Hall of the Livingston Student Center at Livingston College, Rutgers in New Jersey. I present it here both as a comment on the presentcrisis and as a response to African American History Month.
First let me say that I am happy and proud to present this address at Livingston College. I came here to Livingston nearly 35 years ago in 1971, which were difficult but still hopeful times. Richard Nixon was president and a war inspired by the cold war was continuing in Vietnam, a war that would kill millions of Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans. Martin Luther King was three years dead, a victim of assassins as he sought to mobilize a PoorPeoples' movement to revive the War on Poverty, which the Vietnam War wakilling, literally and figuratively. Yet many millions still believed in what King had called “positive peace,” peace with social justice, peace that produces the equality that makes real social cooperation possible.
The Nixon administration was committing many crimes but people were fighting back and the courts were standing with them. Livingston was a school dedicated to King's vision of positive peace, and his vision of social diversity, in which, as he said in his great March on Washington speech, 'everyone, black and white, Protestant and Catholic, Jew and gentle, could really say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at least, thank God all mighty, we are free at least.’
Since he believed in progress, King understood that a great victory for democracy, for an actual democracy, was won with the destruction of Southern segregation, but it was only the beginning. He would look at the South where he been raised. He always considered himself a Southerner and respected the positive aspects of Southern culture. Today, he would see a new 'solid South,' supporting a Republican Party actively opposed to positive peace, peace with social justice, and using a coded racist language whereas the old Southern segregationist Democrats were open in their racism.
If he had attended the funeral of his wife, Coretta, he would have heard George Bush the father speaking, the same George Bush who in 1988 ran the Willie Horton commercial against Michael Dukakis, stirring up fears of a Black man released from prison raping and killing people as a way to appeal to the oldest and most brutal stereotype in US history, one that goes back to slavery times – that of white radicals and liberals, abolitionists, and later civil rights activists, unleashing violent Blacks on society (whereas they had been contented and controlled under slavery and segregation). King would forgive George Bush the father, even though that is very hard to do
King would look at the courts which under progressive leadership provided protection for the movement to end the brutal dictatorship that segregation represented for both Black people and for whites also, since the whites of the South in terms of education, income, standard of living and quality of life were well below the whites of the North. Would the Supreme Court today, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Roberts, have voted unanimously to end school segregation as they did in the Brown Case? Would the courts have supported the Montgomery Bus boycott as they did in 1956? Would this Supreme Court have advanced civil liberties in the Miranda and Gideon decisions, which gave poor defendants the right to attorneys and made police read all defendants their rights? Would these courts restrict illegal searches and seizures, wiretapping, and tribunals using secret testimony against defendants, as the courts in the late 1950s and 1960s, which rolled back the worst of McCarthyite policies, did?
King wouldn't lose hope. He would remember that in the worst of times, in the high cold war period, people – Black and white – had fought back and built a powerful social movement when no one believed it was really possible, when blacklists and loyalty oaths, a draft army, and fear of nuclear war were the order of the day, so that they really changed America and helped to change the world.
King would see the increased openness, the fact that whites and Blacks, and men and women, have greater space to learn to understand each other, to relax with each other, to learn from and accept each other. Integration, while it is very, very uneven and there have been major reverses, has produced a better society, a more interesting one, a society where cultural diversity gives people many more choices in what they eat, how they dress, the books they read, the music they listen to. Towards people like Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Clarence Thomas, King would have very mixed feelings, since he really wasn't interested in having African Americans or other people integrate into and join the political forces that he had fought all of his life.
King would understand, I think, that what has happened since his death was the continuation of what he had fought against during his life, institutional racism, poverty, and war taking new forms, undermining the creation of a country that would be based on positive peace, a de facto rather than a de jure democracy.
While millions of people were in motion against the Vietnam War, radicals and liberals began to fight each other. The war itself took billions away from the war on poverty and took, through the draft, many African American and other minority people away from their communities. Law and order was a slogan that Richard Nixon used in 1968 to push back the movement for domestic reform. Affirmative action was already being condemned as reverse racism, even though anyone who believed that you could end institutional racism in a society where slavery had existed from 1619 to 1965 and, after the defeat of reconstruction, segregation until the 1960s, without affirmative action policies, was either a hypocrite or a complete utopian.
But the economy was crisis-ridden. The long period of economic expansion from WWII to the 1970s, fueled by government military spending most of all, was ending. Military spending had become a drug, something like heroin, a fix for economic problems that became a dependency as the addict needed more and more just for maintenance. As with heroin, the good feelings obscure the reality that the drug is destroying the addict. American firms were relocating first to cheap labor Southern states in the U.S. (the Sunbelt) and then to cheaper labor areas in Mexico, Central America, and offshore Asian enterprise zones. When the Vietnam War ended many hoped therewould be a government that would address the social and economic needs of the people.
What followed was a political vacuum in which rightwing radicals, religious zealots, and all of those threatened by what Martin Luther King had lived and died for, floated to the surface and blamed everything, including the huge inflation created by the rise of OPEC (never mind that U.S. firms had encouraged both the profligate use of oil and reliance on middle eastern petroleum, where through Aramco and the Saudis, they were entrenched for decades) all on big spending liberals, and welfare cheats.
Intelligent people who were concerned citizens in an actual democracy wouldn't simply believe those things. They would check the facts and find out that federal money for public assistance was a few pennies on the dollar compared to military spending. Most of the money spent for the millions of people who really were on public assistance came from local budgets, particularly from urban budgets. The US never really was a welfare state like the West Europeans, with no national system of socialized medicine, no paid maternity leaves; public day care, or tuition-free higher education.
It is always easy to be taught to hate and fear what you don't know and have little contact with, whether it is people of other ethnic groups and religions or different ways of living. To paraphrase Karl Marx, just when one believes that great changes are taking place, the dead hand of the past exacts its revenge on the present. A racism that was weakened but hardly dead, now acted as the glue to bring together male chauvinism, homophobia, and an attempted cultural counter-revolution cloaked in clerical garb.
Over and above the economic crisis was the political crisis. The Democrats had been the majority party of the country since the 1930s. WWII had set back the New Deal social programs. The Korean War killed Harry Truman's Fair Deal updating of the New Deal, including national health insurance and federal aid to education. The Vietnam War killed Lyndon Johnson's Great Society Program.
Now the Democrats had nothing except a born again Christian, one term Southern governor who talked about making the administration more efficient, someone who talked and acted like a liberal Republican with a Southern accent. Jimmy Carter was a decent man and a conservative, post segregation Southern Democrat who didn't know who to deal with the urban industrial North, the labor movement particularly, because in Georgia he never had to. Southern cities, on the other hand, were run by business cliques who were relatively liberalcompared to the county courthouse bible-belters who ran the countryside.
A second oil inflation crisis and a revolution in Iran where the CIA had overthrown a liberal government in 1953 and set up the Shah as a dictator to make sure the oil was privatized, now crippled the Carter administration.
The political and economic crises interacted with each other to create a kind of hysteria in 1980 - not the hysteria of the early cold war era, the hysteria of atomic spies and Soviet-directed revolutions, but one of double digit inflation and double digit interest rates. A moment of truth gripped millions. The American way of life was based on the installment plan, on buying forever on credit. The public sector of the economy was based on military spending. Society couldn't continue to have its cake and eat it too in reality, but its ruling class could try to convince its people to forget about reality.
Who better to deny reality than a movie actor, and a mediocre one at that? Ronald Reagan said America could have it all and more, past, present and future. It could cut taxes and increase military spending and balance the budget with a constitutional amendment, defeat the evil empire that the Soviet Union was, and live forever in the past in the name of building the future. Forget about the cities, forget about the poor, forget about the minorities, and forget about your better judgment. Reagan learned something from the cultural critics of the 1960s. The medium is the message: we will write the stories and you will be happy, at least the majority of you who vote.
Reagan was a weak man who pretended to be strong, a movie and television actor who worked for studios from 1937 to 1964, who never owned his own business or in reality made his own decisions, who was taken care by the rich and powerful for doing their bidding. He didn't solve the economic crisis of the 1980s for the majority of people. He talked about 'a new beginning' as things rapidly went from bad to worse.
First, huge budget cuts produced the worst recession since the 1930s. Then unprecedented increases in military spending overcame the recession. Next the worst kind of federally supported union busting campaign helped stagnate real wages. Then trade policies that opened up U.S. markets to foreign goods cost good jobs while cheap-labor service jobs proliferated and social welfare cuts produced for the first time since the 1930s mass homelessness.
Like a sinister Mr. Magoo, Reagan walked blindly through the world doing well for himself and his administration while disasters surrounded him. Reagan actively supported and saved Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, which helped to push down oil prices but set the stage for Hussein's persecution of his own people and two Gulf Wars. Reagan unleashed the CIA to work with Pakistanis and train rightwing Muslim holy warriors to fight the Communist government recently established in Afghanistan and its Soviet allies. Osama bin Laden, a member of the multibillion dollar bin Laden family, long connected to U.S. business interests, was major figure in recruiting foreign Muslims to fight and also in raising money from the rich in the region.
The fact that these holy warriors also hated Christians and Jews and Western consumer capitalism along with Soviet socialism didn't matter to the Reagan administration, which was fighting the Soviets and Afghan Communists. Although Al Qaeda in 1988 when Reagan was still president, along with bin Laden and his friends, were called freedom fighters rather than terrorists, the stage was set for what the CIA calls 'blowback” and what I call creating Frankensteins.
When 'victory' was won in Afghanistan, one of the most brutal regimes on earth, the Taliban came to power, with Pakistani support and no U.S. opposition. When the Soviet Union was dismembered by its own leaders, the rightwing Muslim groups the Reagan administration created to fight Holy Wars against the Soviets now launched a Holy War against the United States in the 1990s. The governments that were cold war allies of the United States or had been created by the Reagan administration gave them money and sanctuary (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Taliban government in Afghanistan), since they weren't revolutionaries, weren't Communists, and were merely killing people and destroying property, they weren't taken that seriously after the Cold War was over and the forces of conservatism and capitalism claimed victory.
America was in many ways a different country after the Reagan years. The turnout in all elections had dropped sharply and the top 20 percent of income earners, who had generally benefited from 'Reaganomics' at the expense of the bottom 80 percent, were often able to swing elections. The national debt had risen from 1 trillion to 4 trillion. The crime rate began to sharply decline as more and more people were sent to jail.
Bill Clinton, another conservative Southern Democrat with more of a popular touch, administered a period of stability. Clinton moved away from extreme rightwing policies, raised taxes, ran budget surpluses, improved environmental policies, avoided any big war and worked with NATO allies. Meanwhile, he didn't revive any of the Democrats’ social programs, did nothing to help labor or keep jobs in the U.S., and joined with the Republicans to destroy federal welfare programs.
The economic crisis was hidden under Clinton, but it continued. The political crisis in reality grew, as the Republican Party gained control of Congress in 1994 and keeps it to this day. The Republican victory in 1994 remains something of a mystery to many. The economy was actually improving. under Clinton's fiscal policies, essentially a rational conservatism, that were much better than Reagan rightwing radicalism or the policy of Bush the father. Actually, under Clinton and only under Clinton, the conservative trickle down theory was actually working in a limited way, as deficits were eliminated and real wages rose modestly.
But Clinton's support for NAFTA alienated labor, as it should have. His failure to enact a national health program alienated the core groups in the Democratic Party. Finally, his appeasement of Newt Gingrich and the rightwing Republicans by going along with their destruction of Federal Welfare, AFDC, was a disaster not only for the poor, but also for his party. Clinton never learned that you could get away with that stuff in Arkansas but not in New York, or Illinois or California or New Jersey.
Clinton's appeasement of the rightwing Republicans only encouraged them to be more and more extreme. It almost destroyed him in their incredible attempt to impeach him for having extra marital sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, and misleading people about it. Even the Republicans adventure in sexual McCarthyism was a failure, although the Clinton years have weakened the Democrats and strengthened them.
Like Reagan, Clinton had engaged in a politics of make believe. Unlike Reagan, he had pursued reasonable successful centrist policies, that of a liberal Republican or a conservative Democrat. Unlike Reagan, he had weakened his party by alienating its core groups and emboldened the Republicans to go further than they ever had. Many thought the impeachment crisis was a sort of silent coup. The election of 2000 was not to be so silent.
Given the state of the economy and the society, Al Gore should have won the election of 2000 and of course he did. Gore won the popular vote very narrowly by 500,000, (not counting Ralph Nader's nearly 3 million votes). The Nader vote was a protest vote against Clinton and the Democrats appeasement policies. Even with it, Gore won, but then unprecedented things as we all know happened in Florida.
The Secretary of State in Florida, co-chair of the Bush campaign, didn't recuse herself and used her power to block a full hand recount of the state, which would have given Gore the presidency. Something called the butterfly ballot, which Democrats in Palm Beach had designed, cost Gore a minimum of 10,000 votes. Finally, the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, intervened to prevent the completion of a recount in Miami and the Democrats folded. In other countries there would have been protests, even riots at such fraud, but here it was accepted with grumbling.
As president, G.W. Bush revived the economic crisis by going back to the Reagan policies of tax cuts for the rich, union busting, and massive increase in military spending. The deficit zoomed into the stratosphere again. Real wages began to decline again. Unions were hit hard again. Along with these policies, Bush out-Reaganed Reagan by alienating the French and the Germans, two major NATO allies, and fighting a real war, a bloody one and an expensive in Iraq in the name of fighting international terrorism (even though the Iraqi dictatorship had nothing really do to with the Al Qaeda murderers, unlike the administration's allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Bush had run in 2000 as a 'compassionate conservative.' Very soon his administration found itself making powerful enemies in the world, France, Germany, Russia, China, powers that had fought with each other and were now looking at the U.S. in the 21st century the way Europeans had looked at Germany and Asians at Japan in the first half of the 20th century, as a country proclaiming its right to use military force unilaterally to attack any nation that didn't do what it wanted, for the U.S. in the name of freedom and democracy.
Today we here experience the economic and political crisis as they interact with each other. Our budgets providing social services and health care, education, subsidies for transportation are cut and cut. The Bush administration's relationship with the UN is worse than that of any U.S. administration, and it is only the UN that can play a role in finding a way out of the Iraq occupation. The Iraq occupation is a disaster that feeds on itself and there is another Frankenstein in Teheran, a very dangerous president with real connections to terrorist groupings.
But pessimism never accomplishes anything. American history is a treasure trove of surprises, and those in power who think they can manipulate the people endlessly to maintain their power have often ended up swept away by the protests that their policies created, whether it was the pro-slavery Democrats of the 1850s and the Supreme Court that enacted the Dred Scott decision, the Business of America is Business Republicans of the 1920s, who helped bring on the Great Depression that destroyed their political majorities and brought about major reforms, Strom Thurmond and the other leaders of Southern segregation in the 1950s who thought that they could evade the Supreme Court and succeed in a policy of massive resistance to integration indefinitely, and even Richard Nixon, who thought that he could act in a dictatorial way, fix elections, and get away with it.
The rightwing extremism of the present administration is an expression of its weakness, not its strength. Its policies have mobilized millions of people against it and educated millions more about the corrupt way in which politics operates in the United States. As an historian, I see the policies of this administration as not only disastrous but doomed. The only question: will the opponents of unilateral military interventionism, an economic policy giving everything to and expecting nothing from corporations and the rich, paid for by robbing the public sector with budget cuts and compounding that robbery with deficits that make the restoration of funds to the public sector, take all of us down with them
There is of course another way. We can draw upon our history and traditions to really create a great society for our people, where the wealth of the nation is organized to achieve social justice and equality, not to deepen inequality. We can have a national industrial policy that rewards firms for producing well paying skilled jobs and punishes them for going abroad to get cheap labor (we can even nationalize those that put there own profits ahead of the public interest) we can protect our home markets and use government to help our unions until they represent a majority of our work force. We can make employment, housing, education, and health care into rights guaranteed for all citizens, not commodities to be purchased in a market.
We can go back to the principle associated with the Roosevelt administration, a good neighbor policy, which Roosevelt directed for Latin America, and make that a model for the world. We can build up rather than tearing down the United Nations, reviving its Relief and Rehabilitation Agencies and its other social agencies. We have the capacity to do all this in a way that no nation on earth does, because of our wealth and our size, and our strategic position.
This is too great a civilization, with all of its flaws, to continue on a path that can only lead, as John Kennedy said in the early 1960s about the nuclear arms race, either to being bankrupt or dead. The country is ours. The culture is ours. The challenge is ours.
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs. Reach him at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
