Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
After reading the latest column by Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times today, entitled “Trump vs Biden is an American History Rerun: 2020 is the struggle between racial liberalism and racial conservatism,” I had to respond with a comment in the paper. Here is Edsall’s column -www.nytimes.com/… and here is my comment:
Yes, this has been Edsall's direction since his and his wife's book "Chain Reaction" in 1991. It gave ideological support to the importance of race inequality over economic inequality, although the data since then, even as presented here, would argue an equal place for reversing economic inequality as the way to help redress racial inequality. It is clearly more complex than that, the two tangled together in the rise of Mass Incarceration. Joe Biden, by choosing a black woman prosecutor, is still straddling the line, which is, nonetheless, still an improvement over Trump.We further to the left, moi a Sanders and AOC supporter, believe that the best way to tackle the race line is to move towards the universalism of FDR's Second Bill of Rights and its stalled and muffled contemporary iteration: the Green New Deal. I see sister Harris's nomination, to borrow the adjective from Cornel West, as a brilliant centrist move - a black woman was pre-ordained by the circumstances of 2020 - and when the Center of the Party panicked and went for Biden over Sanders, they now have their safe and non-threatening VP, who knows the rungs of the power ladder, and who is at the top, better than she knows the black street. Or poor white regions. In that, we are getting an Obama re-run. Which I will support over the manifest tyranny of Trump, but which I fear will repeat the history of the Dem. Party's mistakes since 1976. Long live the Green New Deal and the Second Bill of Rights.
The Context:
For just about a decade now, ever since I wrote about John Brown’s raid on the federal Harper’s Ferry Arsenal in Virginia on October 16, 1859, it being the 150th anniversary year then, I have held two historical analogies in my mind for the fate of our Republic. The first, rooted in our own history, when the center did not hold in the 1850’s, was prompted by the stalemate’s in Congress, the Republican pledge to oppose whatever our first Black President proposed, which only intensified in the clashing ideological positions on what to do about the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, the trials of 2007-2009. In my mind, race was part of this dynamic, side-by-side with the divisions over the nature of the political economy, and the role of the federal government in both long running American tragedies.
The second, almost needless to state from a man who has spent his life on the political left since 1968, is rooted in the fate of the Weimar Republic, the years in Germany between 1918 and 1933, the third of the great catastrophes of the 20th century, after the First World War and the Great Depression, each searing the pain and the reaction of those two into the rise of the Nazis.
Of course, I have taken a lot of heat over the years from the champions of American Exceptionalism, in both parties, and those who, like George Will, believed that the “economic question” was settled after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. This pronouncement was seemingly confirmed by the market uber alles celebrations of Bill Clinton, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers in the 1990’s; if you were center-right then, and this in Maryland certainly carried over well into the first decade of the new century...and right up to the Ben Jealous gubernatorial fiasco in 2018, neither of my analogies were apt, indeed, they were outrageous. Maryland Democrats, and especially the affluent ones, fled to conservative Republican Larry Hogan in droves. TINA.
Yet here we are in the late summer of 2020, and our disgraceful President is unashamedly publicly stating that the election is already rigged against him, and he has been using all his Executive Power and Appointments, the Post Office outrages only the most blatant, to indicate he’s not leaving, win or lose. It may take years to count those mail in ballots, he says.
Which makes my analogies lean towards that man who came to power in 1933, and ran over all the fledgling German democratic checks and balances...Yet, can we get away from the 1850’s entirely, given what Edsall has laid out for us, and there is much fact and truth in what he has done in this column...Yet it is the deeper ideological forces, and the remedies which might flow from our differences, that separate me from Edsall. For a more complete presentation of my views, please visit the essay “Major Miscalculations: Globalization, Economic Pain, Social Dislocation, and the Rise of Trump,” published in 2017-2018, in a magazine and a book. rwer.wordpress.com/… and here: www.paecon.net/...
Today, as I thought about this posting, I visited Joe Biden’s website and the ticket’s store, now updated with his Vice Presidential choice. In my cart I have a yard sign, for $20, to plant in the reddest of Maryland’s Trumpian regions, inspired by a young black man’s yard sign pre-Kamala Harris. I stopped the car, the 20 year old car, when I saw him, a new neighbor, and asked how he felt about the VP choice. He said he wasn’t happy. That’s the “prosecutor-Mass Incarceration” effect on young black men, I would guess, with the small sample danger duly noted, and another quick porch step conversation with a young black man elicited a similar response. Even stronger, in fact.
I always wondered, for a half-century now, what I would have done in Weimar Germany in the election of 1932; voted for the Social Democrats, the famous SPD, (Social Democratic Party of Germany) I think, the Socialist party which was institutionalized in the power of the labor unions, and the largest party in the Reichstag, but not the most powerful force in the country. Rural Germany, the land of thrifty, hard working small shop keepers and hard pressed farmers, and their even poorer workforce, had a very difficult time imagining the proletarian life in Berlin and Hamburg...where the second or third allegedly most powerful economy in the world saw its working class poorer than that in the US, England and France...with a dramatic housing shortage which was never cured.
So in the Biden basket the yard sign goes, along with two buttons. I’m supposed to be in retirement, but if comes down to citizens storming the White House to remove the tyrant, I hope I can still set myself in motion. Far fetched? Thank heaven that Col. Larry Wilkerson, whom I’ve followed for years being interviewed by Paul Jay, now at his new media post theanalysis.news/...is on the job, game planning the dire possibilities, like any good military thinker should. We’re eye to eye on most things, setting aside the vision for political economy, but I’d take him over John Kasich any day, the Kasich who got more time that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Just thought I’d mention that...
That’s the best I can do in the year of 2020.
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD