A Taste of Their Own Medicine

I find myself getting angrier by the day and wanting to give the extremists, the alt-WRONG, the Trumpistas, the people who think the road to greatness is violence against each other, a taste of their own medicine. They chanted “Lock her up” and I want to lock HIM up, and THEM too.

More than that, I keep thinking of the loyalty oaths we had to sign in the 50s and 60s, spread by Joe McCarthy and used to attack liberals. It was very effective in destroying the pro-labor movement, the left that called for measures to make life better for working people. That was what the McCarthy loyalty oaths took down. The left morphed, of course. In the 60s it switched to integration and the women’s movement so that the Trump crowd could now slander the left claiming we liberals don’t care about workers.

But now, like the old loyalty oaths, it’s time to make people swear under penalties of perjury that they have never brought guns or other weapons to demonstrations, or into public buildings, or threatened public officials with them. It’s time to fence in those who believe that politics is a blood sport, decided not by votes but by force. This goes much deeper than Trump and it needs to be removed from the body politic. Maybe the alt, the racists, misogynists and extremists who are afraid of fair competition with Blacks and women will morph into something more constructive – though I don’t have a prayer that they will ever understand that we all do better when everyone does better.

The South took back their loss in the Civil War with continued violence, guerilla violence where necessary until they took over a part of this nation and ruled it for a century of segregation and intimidation. Now it’s time to finish the job of taking this country back and threaten and intimidate those who think threats, intimidation, assault and murder are fine means of politics. This country has no place for people who put victory and murder above democracy. We talk about violence in this country but the way-over-the-top racists are the problem and before we tear down the prisons, we should use them to lock the violent racists up. What goes around comes around and that includes gun violence as well as biological violence by refusing to abide by the rules of public health, overwhelming our hospitals and killing people both ways. They don’t believe in life. When you take away the idea that they care about human life, what you are left with in the anti-abortion hysteria is misogyny. Blacks and women, that’s what these extremists are afraid of. They are cowards in daily life trying to claim bravery with their weapons, mobs and threats.

Frankly, it’s very disturbing that there are people who still support the monster called Trump, who will work against any non-Trumper in politics even though there are no Trump policies – he got rid of every idea as soon as he announced it: love the uneducated but support the rich; love the workers in middle-America but ditch the infrastructure projects he promised. He lies to his most devoted supporters because he can.

The biggest dupes of Trump are the ones in the Red hats. He’s filled their minds and bellies with words. And turned many into traitors.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on the WAMC Northeast Report, on January 12, 2021.

To Heal America’s Heart

At this time of year we celebrate kindness and generosity. We celebrate helping each other and breaking down mutual distrust and dislike. I love the lyrics Rogers and Hammerstein put into the mouth of Julie Andrews in The King and I:

Getting to know you; Getting to know all about you;

Getting to like you; Getting to hope you like me

Unfortunately, there are many in our country who don’t believe we benefit from meeting and getting to know each other and believe, instead, that we have to fight each other to the finish. If democracy becomes an existential game, then it’s the old story we used to tell each other about cowboys and Indians without room for both. It’s also what economists call a deadweight loss – all that fighting doesn’t build anything and it’s very costly.

If we recognize that we all depend on each other, we feed, hire, heal and help each other in virtually all the aspects of life, then we can make a better world for ourselves too. All of us are each other’s essential workers, caregivers, customers and builders.

Erasing racial barriers strengthened many parts of America. Sports are obvious: teams are better; games are more exciting. And because we’re all part of the market, the owners benefit too. The Dodgers gained a Black audience with Jackie Robinson, and soon, other teams did too. Many industries discovered that a diverse workforce is a better workforce, more creative, more able to think out of the box.

Numerous studies discovered that military service in World War II had the result of bridging ethnic, religious and linguistic differences among us. As I’ve commented before, servicemen coming home brought their service buddies to meet their families. There aren’t many alive any more who could describe the old prejudices among what we now call White Americans but they were virulent before World War II and almost gone after. Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed, “the military tent, where all sleep side-by-side, will rank next to the public school among the great agents of democratization.”[1] The Army has extended its efforts to improve the relationships among White- and African-Americans and it has been fairly successful.

Many of us are devoted to integration but we’ve been saddened to realize that much of what we accomplished in law was sabotaged in reality. Federal agencies encouraged banks to redline Black areas and not loan to African-Americans. Parents looking for the best schools located away from African-Americans. Factories moved to suburbs, away from most Black workers.

There are ways to build emotional links, like those the soldiers came home with after World War II, at the same time that we rebuild selfless American patriotism and educate younger generations about what America is made of and how it works. One tool is national service. It effectively becomes an internship working on the things America needs. It would have similarities to military service, the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, and other service programs. And they pump money into the economy and tighten the job market.

Many communities in this country are hurting. But we learned to pull together for each other. We voted for John Kennedy and his pledge to revive Appalachia. People in cities have supported costly programs to benefit farmers for nearly a century. People all over our country have supported programs that primarily helped others. We’ve helped to dig whole communities out from under hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters without regard to who was injured where or which way their states voted. We’ve helped or tried to help when the injured were white and when the injured were Black. If we lose that spirit of unity and generosity, then God help America – we’ll need it.

 – This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on the WAMC Northeast Report, on December 22, 2020.

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^[1]Quoted in John Whiteclay Chambers, II, Conscripting for Colossus: The Progressive Era and the Origin of the Modern Military Draft in the United States in World War I, in The Military in America From the Colonial Era to the Present 302 (New York: Free Press, Peter Karsten, ed., rev. ed. 1986).

Testing Republican Loyalty on the Route to Dictatorship

My heart wants to talk about the momentous things happening in our country but the disloyalty of this president is too frightening to talk about anything else.

He keeps firing people who’re trying to follow the law. He’s stripping government of the people who protected us from disease, poison and catastrophe, from dangerous workplaces and frauds, leaving most of us with little ability to protect ourselves. We’re out of work, out of money and have lost control of many boards of elections. When does it become too much?

He’s allied himself with the most extreme racists, people who’ve little compunction at brandishing, intimidating, threatening the rest of us with their weapons. Who’s safe then?

FBI records have made it clear that the – I refuse to use the name they call themselves – but the alt-sickos he praises and incites are the same ones who have been responsible for the vast majority of domestic terrorism in this country. Some of you may be too young to remember Timothy McVeigh who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing that killed and injured nearly a thousand people including 19 children in a day care center. He came from the same sewer of hate. The alt-screwed up wing that Trump insists on encouraging has been the source of the mass shooters that have caused so much grief. They’ve united law-breakers with political enmity. The combination is deadly. Do we need more proof?

Encouraging violence, creating chaos and then posing as the savior is a path tyrants have followed all over the world to take power, and, gaining power, turned their followers loose on the population until everyone bows in feigned allegiance to avoid their own and their family’s arrest, rape and murder.

The other major path is to gain control of the military. Trump has been firing everyone inquiring into his misbehavior. He’s fired much of the top brass of the military for daring to say that the military must stay out of politics or otherwise stand up to him.

How far is Dangerous Donald trying to go? And what will happen to us if he gets what he wants?

If this president attempts to take over by force, who will stand in his way? Will the Senate be loyal to Trump or to America and the rule of law and democracy? Will the Army be loyal to Trump or to America, the rule of law and democracy now that he has been stripping responsible military leaders of their stripes? Will there be anyone left to say no and lead the troops against a presidential putsch? Is it too late for the Court now that they have authorized massive stripping of voters from the records? Will we stop this slide into tyranny before it’s too late?

To allow this President to take over the reins of power he believes are his, will erase all efforts to make this a more decent country. This is a real test of the loyalty of Republican Senators – to Mr. Trump, or to the Constitution that so many Republicans have so loudly proclaimed as if they alone obey it. Are they loyal to the law and its superiority over everyone, high and low, or are they devoted instead to the notion of impunity, that some people can do any damage they choose to other people, to our government and to America itself without facing justice. Frankly, I am guessing that we are going to see immense disloyalty to America and failure to insist that the president has an obligation to our country and not just to his own ambitions. If you could read the records of the Founders of our country, you would quickly discover that Trump is the man they were afraid of.

There is no second chance. Republicans must show their courage now or survive only in infamy.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on June 23, 2020.

Trump’s Second Amendment Hooligans

The pandemic has been making life quite difficult for many of us, but if we don’t figure out a way to deal with Trump’s invitations to violence things can get a lot worse.

Gun owners are not made in cookie cutters and the differences are large. I know lots of people who own guns and it’s never given me a moment’s concern. Many if not most gun owners are responsible and trustworthy. They are not killers and they’re not using their guns to play rough with people.

But there is a minority that believe that gun rights, or what Mr. Trump prefers to call Second Amendment rights, give them the privilege to threaten, intimidate and even kill to make things come out their way. Threats, intimidation and murder are not protected by the Second Amendment. They’re crimes. People who believe the Second Amendment gives them such rights are hooligans or terrorists, not responsible people who deserve anything but the insides of jail cells or loony bins. Those people are “deplorable.”

The statistics make clear that they’ve done more damage in America than the foreign terrorists we say we fear. Trump wants us to believe that there are, as he put it, good people on both sides, but White Supremacists account for the vast majority of home-grown terrorism in this country. And they reliably respond to his invitations, resulting in a very clear and present danger of violence and bloodshed.

When Mr. Trump told people to liberate Michigan with their Second Amendment rights, he was not suggesting that they keep their guns holstered or cased or even pointed at the sky. He was appealing to hooligans and terrorists to force the rest of us to do their bidding.

When Mr. Trump took office the Constitution required him to:

“solemnly swear (or affirm) that [he] will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of [his] ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Millions of Americans have taken oaths that we were

“not a member of the Communist Party or any other organization which advocates the overthrow of the Government by force or violence.”

In fact Mr. Trump is trying to overthrow it. A leading, so-called birther, he denied Obama’s right to the office though Obama was properly elected and behaved in a careful and thoughtful way for the good of all of us. By contrast, Trump uses the classic methods to try to overthrow the government by force and violence. Budding dictators encourage violence, create chaos and then pose as the savior to take over. When Trump creates a clear and present danger of violence by inviting gun owners to use their Second Amendment rights, they get the signal, and Trump relies on their lawlessness to put people in terror if they oppose him. Like other budding dictators who’ve called out the military against their own people, Trump called out a show of military force against domestic demonstrators to clear his path to a photo op in front of a Washington church and over-awe Americans with his control of the levers of deadly power. A would-be dictator, Mr. Trump is repudiating his American citizenship.

Guns owners who respond to Trump’s incitement are giving a very bad name to responsible gun owners, to owners who don’t use their guns and their votes to constrain political behavior like that. It’s time to take back the NRA from the unreconstructed Civil War rebels, terrorists, hooligans and their enablers who claim the protection of their guns and the Second Amendment in your name. It’s time to break the White House link with liars, hooligans, and terrorists.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on June 9, 2020.

REFERENCES:

New America Foundation, IN DEPTH, Terrorism in America After 9/11 https://www.newamerica.org/in-depth/terrorism-in-america/what-threat-united-states-today/;

Daniel Byman,  Right-Wingers Are America’s Deadliest Terrorists, Slate, Aug. 5, 2019, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/right-wing-terrorist-killings-government-focus-jihadis-islamic-radicalism.html.

DANIEL MORITZ-RABSON, New NRA President Is Board Chair for Organization Managing Country’s Largest Confederate Monument, Newsweek, 4/30/19 AT 10:52 AM EDT – https://www.newsweek.com/nra-president-chairs-organization-country-largest-confederate-mounment-1409648

How the NRA went from a marksmanship group to a controversial political powerhouse. In his new book, investigative journalist Frank Smyth explores the group’s rise to favor, particularly under the Trump administration. By Hope Reese  Updated Apr 2, 2020, 11:00am EDT, The Highlight by Vox, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2020/3/24/21191524/nra-national-rifle-association-history-frank-smyth-wayne-la-pierre

 

Take America Back

It is painful to see the forces of hate killing men, women and children on many continents and here in many states, in schools and public places, taking apart the work of what we have been honoring as the greatest American generation who spilt their blood for the America they loved. It is painful and frightening to see the effort of the alt-Wrong to rip apart the free world that this country took the lead in creating. It’s painful to see terrorists crediting an American president as their inspiration for murder.

When I was a small boy, American men were fighting, and dying, in the Pacific, Africa, Italy and, after the landing in Normandy, through France and Germany. They were struggling for freedom, democracy and brotherhood. As the war ended, Truman sent Franklin Roosevelt’s widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, to the UN. Truman sent her there to make clear to the world the depth of America’s commitment to building a robust and sustainable free world. She chaired the seventeen-­member UN Commission on Human Rights and led that body in the development of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You could have drawn much of it from our own Constitution. These were American ideals on the world stage.

In 1948, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Vinson held racially restrictive covenants unconstitutional. Then in 1952 the NAACP brought five cases to the Supreme Court challenging segregation and seeking to overrule Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that had upheld segregation in 1896. The Truman Administration told the Court that the US was being attacked around the globe because of segregation and that segregation complicated American foreign policy. Obviously important, the case was reargued after President Eisenhower took office and Chief Justice Vinson had died. Eisenhower’s Justice Department submitted its own brief to the Court, and it underscored the arguments of the Truman Administration that this country needed to end segregation. The Supreme Court agreed; in Brown and a series of cases it made clear that American government could make no distinction of race, creed or heritage in its treatment of Americans.

Americans cheered Brown and made clear it was a popular decision. We believed what they said in the Declaration, that “all men are created equal.” Americans fought a Civil War over that principle. By the time of Brown, this country had embraced people like Jesse Owens, Marion Anderson, and Ralph Bunche among many others. With some obvious and vocal exceptions, Americans embraced the end of segregation. That is the America embraced the world over, admired for its principles and its heart. That is the America that took all of us to its heart regardless of which country our ancestors came from, which faith they brought. That is the country that our ancestors embraced with both love and pride, the America they wanted to be part of and contribute to. That is the America they wanted for us. That is the America we need to take back.

An America with neither mind nor heart clearly needs a trip to see a Wizard of Oz. An America with a man in a position of power who gloats that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” with impunity is an America which actually does need to deport someone, and to wall out the orange-haired imposter before he corrupts our genetic inheritance.

— A version of this commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, March 19, 2019.

Democracy Needs Generosity

What’s wrong with our politics is its too common don’t-tread-on-me selfishness.

“What’s-in-it-for-me” politics in the early republic held up roads, canals and other internal improvements for decades until we learned to share. Democracy needs some generosity.

After 9/11, Congress passed appropriations for local safety and security. I spoke with a former congressman from this area about New York City’s share. He responded about his district’s various rural areas. I pointed out that the people in his district had important ties to New York City – family or friends there for jobs or schools. Others with close business ties. He responded that he hadn’t thought of that. Frankly that’s what’s wrong with our politics. We need to think about what binds us together instead of what splits us apart. And yes, even the subways New York City depends on. If we starve the subways because it’s there, not here, we starve ourselves; and vice versa.

The same connections are true of our ethnic, racial, religious and gender groups. Some hate paying for anyone else’s schooling. Yet it’s even costlier to clean up after or imprison people who’ve never been given the tools to pull their weight in society.

Should God forbid equalizers like Social Security or Obamacare, though they’re cheaper than the costs imposed by inequality?

The alt-atrocious white supremacists would give us a war of all against all, which makes only corpses and refugees, leaving no one safe – not supremacists, minorities, family, men, women or children.

Since Revolutionary America, colleges kept inviting broader, more diverse groups of students in order to sustain themselves. Industry learned production required people working together regardless of language or faith. Commercial firms learned that lesson to sell their products. The military learned that successful missions required soldiers to support each other regardless of color, origin, language, faith or sexual orientation. Whenever diversity looked problematic, it ended by strengthening American institutions.

America IS great, not in spite of diversity but because of it. Our ideals have led Americans to work well together. The lesson of brotherhood has been our great strength.

Meeting and introducing my classmates to an African-American Olympic champion who won four medals in front of a fuming Hitler did me no harm. Befriending fellow law students from every faith and continent hurt none of us! Just the contrary as we became comfortable with and learned from each other. Perhaps the biggest lesson we all learned is that both lovely and nasty people come in all colors, cultures and tongues.

Climate change, terrorism, threats of war, and economic collapse truly threaten to embitter our lives. Pulling together will be essential to combatting them. Prejudice is a distraction and an obstacle. No children should be left behind. We all have to take care of each other. From federal workers to the homeless, we all have to take care of each other.

Remember President Kennedy’s call: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Some of what we do has to benefit others. Without sharing the gains, there may be no gains to share.

The second President Bush turned Kennedy on his head. He wanted us to counter terrorism by shopping. Bush’s vision was victory without blood, sweat, tears, money or sacrifice. After all we’re number 1. But that’s a fantasy. People unwilling to take pains for the benefit of America and its democratic inheritance cannot enjoy its gains.

It’s broader than that. We must care about the welfare of the European Union, Mexicans, Hondurans and each other, or reap the whirlwind.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, January 22, 2019.

Racists and Self-Interest

I have no illusions that anything I can say would convince white nationalists to flip their political sides. Nevertheless, I think it is important to engage them.

There is of course a strong moral argument based on the Enlightenment, reflected in the Declaration of Independence, that all of us are born equal. But let me see if I can engage anyone with arguments based on their own self-interest?

First, I don’t know how many of the white nationalists have had their DNA checked by 23 and Me or similar organizations. They might find that their own backgrounds are multicultural much like the rest of us. And I’m not sure how many of the white nationalists want to reject or deport their own grandparents or other ancestors.

Beyond that, racial, religious and ethnic nationalism is basically what is called, in language stemming from game theory, a zero-sum game. That is to say, we have a pie of specific size and fight about how to cut it up. But that’s a faulty premise. In fact, the larger the group that participates in the productive process, the more there is for everyone to do. The success of this country was based on our own common market among the states from the very beginning from the Canadian to the Florida border. That gave us a big advantage and propelled this country into the forefront economically within a few years. The European Union was developed and has been prosperous for much the same reason. And there is plenty of factual data that multi-cultural workforces lead to expanding their businesses much more than homogenous ones. It’s easy to look at a single job and notice who has it and who might have had it, but without looking at whether that job and many others would exist in a narrower market one does not have anything close to a full picture. So, I don’t think trade among multiple different cultures, or the development of complex multi-cultural economies are zero sum games. I do think they expand opportunities for us all. And the economic risk from trying to cut oneself off from that is stagnation and decline.

I have another concern about rejecting multi-culturalism: China, not to mention the rest of Asia. One of the things Obama realized, a realization no less true or false if one objects to the color of the man, was that the nations of Asia were focused on their economic advancement, were working hard to grow and were quite successful at it. That was behind his hope to “pivot to Asia.” But our own treatment of people from all the Asian countries, as visitors, residents and citizens, can strengthen or weaken our relations and our cooperation in foreign and economic policy. Perceived as racist, we can become the target of attack. Nations like China and India have the size and fire power to be problems. In briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court in the early 1950s, both the Democratic Truman Administration and the Republican Eisenhower Administration argued for an end to the separate but equal doctrine partly because it made international diplomacy difficult.

I don’t even want to talk about the possibility of internal war. Both for our country and for each of us, white nationalism is a dangerous mistake.

After writing this, we took our grandchildren to Tanglewood for a Young People’s Concert. At one point the BSO played Leonard Bernstein’s music for the rumble in West Side Story, a retelling of Romeo and Juliet set in Manhattan. The rumble pitted the white Jets gang against the Puerto Rican Sharks. It ends in universal disaster. In the suite that Bernstein created from the music, as Tony lies dying in Maria’s arms, the harsh, jagged music for the rumble dissolves into the lyrical, wistful music of Somewhere There is a Place for Us. Somewhere indeed. My granddaughter caught tears rolling down my face. Bernstein like Beethoven before him believed that music could somehow bring us together. I wish it were so.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, August 14, 2018.

For Peaceful Counter-protests

There is a debate that follows political activism – whether to be peaceful or violent. I’ve seen reviews of contrary scholarship. One view is that the old KKK used many of the same tactics as the modern “Alt-right,” using clownish outfits to draw in supporters so that laughter just helps their strategy and is an unhelpful response: The Ku Klux Klan Used the Same Trolling Tactics as the Alt-Right: https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-ku-klux-klan-were-memelords. Instead that scholar argues that Klan opponents at the turn of the 20^th century literally beat them up. There were communities that kept the Mafia out the same way. But that view underestimates the impact of the Klan. Literally it kept a large part of the U.S. intimidated, quiet about their depredations, and unwilling to investigate or convict for a century. I don’t see good evidence that violence held the Klan in check.

The reverse view is that violence feeds the Alt-wrong. This is the same point many have made about violence in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. Violence feeds the sense of discrimination that is a large part of the Alt-wrong rhetoric and sense of grievance. Thus it becomes a recruiting tool. Plus the Alt-wrong appears way more ready to use violence to harm and intimidate than any other populations in America:  Don’t respond to fascists with violence. A German town offers some helpful tips. See:

The Civil Rights Movement put a very large effort into staying nonviolent. Violence was always the tool of the enemy and demonstrations were arranged to highlight that violence for a national audience, preferably on television. That effort was much more successful in shutting the Klan down than the earlier confrontations.

I would add that the contemporary American public is much more hostile toward violence than it was in 1900, despite the posturing, violence and intimidation of the Alt-wrong. So it is very important to avoid becoming the perpetrator of violence, and to follow the tactics of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. By contrast the antiwar movement, against the war in Vietnam, did resort to property destruction and my judgment was that they lost support in those demonstrations. I much preferred demonstrations carrying candles to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, or the reading of the names of American servicemen killed, and similarly powerful, but nonviolent demonstrations. I would follow the insight of Dr. King and the Civil Rights demonstrators in the present struggle and keep ourselves peaceful.

With all good wishes for you and for our country, Steve