The Winds Of Change.

Yesterday's Gone: Cold shivers are running up and down the spines of conservatives everywhere. Donald Trump may have gone, but all the signs point to there being something much more momentous in the wind-shift than a simple return to the status quo ante. A change is gonna come.

ONE COULD ALMOST feel sorry for them. Until, that is, their propositions are subjected to robust interrogation. All around the world, conservatives are feeling the fresh winds blowing out of Washington – and they are shivering. They fear that ideas hitherto denied the full imprimatur of state power have been issued arms and are on the march. In short, today’s conservatives are feeling what old-fashioned Labourites and social democrats felt in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was sworn-in as the fortieth President of the United States.

President Joe Biden is 78 years old. He has trod the floor of the Capitol Building for nigh on 40 years, trimming his sails to the prevailing winds as all successful politicians learn to do. All those years of experience are speaking to him now: warning him that the mighty gale currently filling the sails of the American ship of state cannot be tacked against, only run before. This will not be a “trimming” presidency: the Biden years will be a time of surging forward.

As one recent comment on The Daily Kos put it: “This isn’t Biden 2008. Something in the last 12 years has broadened his horizon and pushed him to centre-left territory. He put RFK’s bust in his office along with Caesar Chavez. If that’s where he’s looking for inspiration, I’m happy.”

Which explains the cold shivers running up and down the spines of conservatives everywhere. Donald Trump may have gone, but all the signs point to there being something much more momentous in the wind-shift than a simple return to the status quo ante.

Biden’s victory was built on the votes of America’s youth, America’s women, and, most triumphantly, on the votes of America’s people of colour. “Sleepy Joe” knows that his campaign was dead in the water until the veteran black congressman from South Carolina, James Clyburn, rallied his people behind the former Vice-President and pushed him all the way to the White House. As a long-time mover-and-shaker in the US Senate, Biden also knows that without the astonishing efforts of black activist Stacey Abrams in Georgia, neither he nor his party could have uplifted the legislative tools of change.

Someone else who knows this is the forty-third President of the United States, George W. Bush. Encountering James Clyburn in the Capitol Building on Inauguration Day, ‘Dubbya’ told the veteran congressman that he was America’s “saviour”. Without his intervention, said Bush, the only politician who could have beaten Trump would not have won the nomination.

Most certainly it was no accident that the person who ended up stealing the show on Inauguration Day was young, female and black. Rightly celebrated for the power of “The Hill We Climb”, her poem in honour of the new President, Amanda Gorman was also a flesh and blood celebration of the new America that is rising. Clearly, it is not going to be an America dominated by the values of conservative white males. Equally clearly, that message has been received loud and clear by conservative white males everywhere.

Fourteen thousand kilometres to the south, the Weekend Herald’s columnist, John Roughan, offered words of advice on the best way to reach out to Trump’s defeated army of followers. He addressed his remarks not only to the US Democratic Party, but also the American news media:

“If American Democrats and the country’s respected newspapers and television networks really would like to bridge their country’s cultural divides, rather than simply saying they do, they need to come halfway over the bridge. They need to overcome their aversion to certain views and respect the fact that a lot of people, about half the population, think that way.”

Wrapped up in those two sentences is pretty much the whole of the world view that conservatives believe to be threatened and which they are moving heaven and earth to protect. Under no circumstances should “respected” media outlets give extensive access (and, by implication, validation) to the voices of those on the receiving end of these “certain views” held by “about half the population”. Rather, it is the duty of the mainstream news media to “overcome their aversion” to such views.

Another way of saying this might be to invite responsible journalists to come halfway across the bridge (Selma Alabama’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, perhaps?) to meet the racism, sexism, climate change denial and white supremacist thinking that has allegedly enthralled half their fellow citizens – along with every other ideological defence of inequality the political right sees fit to advance.

Failure to display such tolerance will have consequences. “If the world is not to suffer more populist disasters,” warns the author of hundreds of NZ Herald leader articles, “possibly even an encore for Donald Trump, news media have to find an open mind again.”

Or, it might have to narrow its mind somewhat.

“Many journalists have had a tertiary education in liberal arts and it shows”, writes Roughan. “Some of their news angles reflect the values and explanations of a social science seminar where nobody’s misfortune can be attributable to poor personal decisions, society is always to blame, if an ethnic minority is underperforming it is evidence of ‘systemic’ racism.”

Is Roughan accusing the graduates of New Zealand’s universities and journalism schools of disseminating “fake news”? Or, is he merely giving credence to Kellyanne Conway’s classic Trumpian assertion that it is perfectly acceptable, when debating politics, to advance “alternative facts”?

Then again, if we are not to trust the evidence of social scientists: or, if we are being asked not to rely upon evidence at all; then in who and in what should we repose our trust? In the scepticism of those whose world views cannot survive the introduction of contradictory evidence? In the ‘reckons’ of people who believe democracy consists of one’s own ignorance being regarded in every respect as the equal of others’ knowledge? Or, are we simply being invited to accept that, politically-speaking, everything goes more smoothly when educated citizens agree to meet ignorance and prejudice half way?

John Roughan argues that Joe Biden struck a series of “clanging notes” when he used his inaugural address to call out “political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism . . . anger, hatred, extremism . . . racism, nativism, fear . . . facts that are manipulated, even manufactured”. What the Weekend Herald columnist did not explain, however, is how the new President could possibly have kept faith with the eighty million Americans whose votes put him in the White House if he had refused to strike the Liberty Bell so forcefully.

The consequences of heeding Roughan’s advice are there in American history for all to see. In the decades following the Civil War, politicians and newspaper editors from North and South insisted with ever-increasing fervour that it was time for the people of the United States to put the rancour of those bloody years behind them. Increasingly, it was asserted that far from being about the abolition of slavery and “a new birth of freedom” for the American republic, the war had only been about its noble antagonists’ differing definitions of freedom. Before long, the veterans of Blue and Gray were warmly embracing each other like long lost brothers.

Thus was racism reprieved in the United States. As white men’s willingness to meet each other half way condemned African-Americans to a life that offered them no way at all to the full and equal enjoyment of their constitutional rights.

Amanda Gorman’s poem spells out the moral obligation this historical failure places upon her fellow citizens:

because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
it’s the past we step into and how we repair it.

New Zealanders should learn from America’s experience. Truth owes nothing to falsehood. Knowledge owes nothing to ignorance. Tolerance owes nothing to prejudice. Equality owes nothing to racism. Justice owes nothing to injustice. And anyone who suggests otherwise is most definitely offering you fake news.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 25 January 2021.

Something Very Big.

Freedom Now: Residents enjoy the new order established in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone of central Seattle in Washington state, USA.

IT’S DOUBTFUL whether many of those applauding the current US protests grasp fully the enormity of what is happening there.

Take those six city blocks in Capitol Hill, Seattle, Washington State. By ordering the Seattle Police to evacuate their East Precinct station-house – the city’s mayor effectively acquiesced in the creation of an “Autonomous” and “Police-Free” Zone in her city’s heart. Not even in the wildest dreams of the Black Panthers – the black revolutionary movement of the 1960s – was such a development ever seriously anticipated. Wanted? Yes. Fought for? Definitely. Achieved? Never.

And, as if the creation of “CHAZ” – the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone – wasn’t enough, the adjoining Cal Anderson Park has been converted into a “people’s park”. This development, too, links back directly to the radical struggles of the 1960s.

In 1969, students at the University of California at Berkeley had attempted to thwart the university authorities’ plans to “develop” what had been a free space frequented by the local community, by setting up a “people’s park” and planting a garden. The area was cleared with considerable brutality on the orders of the then Governor of California – Ronald Reagan.

Peoples Park protesters, Berkeley, California, 1969.

What we are witnessing in Seattle – and in a host of other cities across the United States – is an astonishing eruption of ideas and projects long since consigned to what their critics assumed was “the dustbin of history”. That this is so clearly not the case raises some quite intriguing questions about what we are actually seeing in the United States. Perhaps the most important question is whether these events, taken together, constitute a pre-revolutionary situation?

In the CHAZ, for example, the watchword has been “self-management”. The local inhabitants have collectively taken over the functions of the exiled police officers. Health care facilities have been established, along with food distribution centres for the poor and homeless. In short, CHAZ has taken on all the attributes of an anarchist “commune” – something not seen (at least not on anything approaching this scale) since the anarchists took over the Spanish city of Barcelona back in the 1930s. (If you want to know what that was like, then read George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia”.)

I would be most remiss if I did not also mention the fact that Seattle, itself, has long been a city where progressive ideas and actions have flourished. It was the famous “Battle of Seattle” which, 20 years ago, called a halt to the hitherto unstoppable forces of “free” trade and globalisation. And 80 years before that, the quasi-revolutionary Seattle General Strike, not only struck fear into the capitalists of Washington State, but also into the entire American ruling-class.

The Battle of Seattle, December 1999.

Similar terrors must now be disturbing the sleep of the USA’s present rulers. In the months following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 they had been perturbed, briefly, by the Occupy Movement. The ease with which the Occupy protests were crushed, however, put them off guard. America’s masters allowed their neoliberal ideologues to persuade them that the youth of America had lost all capacity to organise effectively and, accordingly, posed no serious threat to the status quo. Their big mistake was to assume that all American youths were white and college-educated. As we have seen over the course of the past three weeks, there are others.

More worrying still, for America’s rulers, must be the way so many authority figures: mayors, police chiefs, media bosses; have openly expressed their support for the ongoing protest demonstrations and – even worse – indicated their willingness to meet many of their demands. Since Neoliberalism and History don’t really mix, the vast majority of the American ruling-class will be unaware of the ominous historical precedent in which ordinarily reliable defenders of the existing order suddenly embrace the key demands of the revolutionary masses.

On the night of 4 August 1789, the French National Assembly, overwhelmed by the giddy elixirs fermented by the revolution then convulsing the country, voted to abolish the feudal system. The entire edifice of aristocratic privilege came tumbling down in a single night – laid low by the aristocrats themselves.

Watching the Minneapolis City Council vote to disband its own Police Department, or the entire Democratic Party membership of the US House of Representatives “take a knee” in remembrance of George Floyd, indicates just how powerful today’s messages of resistance have grown.

The key question, of course, is: Where will it stop? Or, perhaps, more darkly: Who will stop it? Certainly, President Donald Trump would like to stop all of it immediately. He was quick to insist that the “ugly anarchists” be driven from Seattle’s streets. The rest of the Republican Establishment: Senators, Governors, Mayors; must similarly be asking themselves when the counter-stroke will fall. When will law and order be restored in the streets? When will the revolution gathering pace across America be asphyxiated in a cloud of tear-gas – or worse.

Because there is much, much worse lurking in the shadows of American society than rogue police officers. Those determined to Make America Great Again have a very different utopia in mind from the one taking shape in the Capitol Hill district of Seattle. Such people will be pulling out their well-thumbed copies of the murderous “Turner Diaries” and just waiting for the word to split-open American society like a rotten log. That’s no idle boast, because, as we all know, not only are these Far-Right fanatics extremely dangerous, but they are also fearsomely well-armed.

But, they are not the only men with guns. When the truly serious shit hits the fan it will be the armed forces of the United States that has the final word. Over the course of the past fortnight the world has been heartened to learn how seriously America’s most senior military officers take their oath to “uphold, protect and defend” the Constitution of the United States. In the end, however, it is the common soldiery that will have the final say on who they will – and will not – slay.

If they decide to heed their Commander-in-Chief, then the Republic will fall. If they decide to defend the Constitution, then a new birth of freedom can, indeed, be expected in the USA.

In the powerful invocation of Leonard Cohen’s revolutionary anthem, “Democracy”:

Sail on, sail on, oh mighty ship of state

To the shores of need, past the reefs of greed,

Through the squalls of hate.

Sail on, sail on, sail on.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 16 June 2020.

The Fragile Promise Of American Democracy.

The Two Americas Collide: You gotta love the Americans marching for George Floyd and the fragile promises of the US Constitution. But, you also gotta keep your eye on the pale rider in the White House, and understand that behind him Hell follows.

THE FRAGILITY of democracy’s promise is becoming clearer with every day that passes. Don’t be fooled by all those inspiring images from the streets of America. No matter how moving, these democratic vignettes do not represent the emerging political reality. For every thousand protesters risking Covid-19 and police violence in America’s public spaces there are hundreds-of-thousands wishing President Donald Trump would stop talking about dominating the protesters and just get on with the job. Those who prove their devotion to democracy by taking action to defend it will always be outnumbered by those unwilling to pay it more than lip-service.

The best historical estimates put popular support for the American Revolution (1776-1783) at around 30 percent. About the same percentage were loyal subjects of King George III. The rest of the population simply kept their heads down until it became clear who had won – at which point they solemnly reassured their neighbours that the victors’ success had always been their most earnest hope.

We should also be profoundly grateful that the science of opinion polling remained undeveloped at the time of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Had pollsters been given access to the American public in the years immediately prior to the war’s outbreak, they would, almost certainly, have confirmed that those favouring the abolition of slavery constituted a minority of the US population – albeit an extremely well-organised and noisy one. Certainly the number of Americans willing to affirm the equality of whites and blacks in the 1850s would have been vanishingly small. Knowing how substantial was the population’s general indifference to the “slavery question” may well have encouraged the slave-owning southern states to stick with the Union – causing US and world history to take a very different turn.

It is equally disconcerting to discover how many of the most “progressive” Americans had fallen out of love with democracy by the early years of the twentieth century. The problem, as they saw it, was that giving people the right to vote in no way guaranteed that they would use it wisely. Middle-class reformers were appalled at the power exercised by the great working-class, immigrant-based, political “machines”. Controlled for the most part by the Democratic Party, these machines were indisputably corrupt (although no more so than the “Gilded Age’s” rapacious corporations and their market-distorting “trusts”) but the solutions put forward by the Progressive Movement – primary elections, the recall referendum, popularly-generated policy “propositions” – proved to be a mixed blessing. (It was, after all, the primary system that delivered the Republican Party’s nomination to Donald Trump!)

Progressive opinion was even more distressed by the ease with which “ordinary” Americans could be turned against their fellow citizens. The supposedly “progressive” President Woodrow Wilson (a Democrat) railed against “hyphenated Americans” (by which he meant German- and Irish-Americans, whose communities remained stubbornly unconvinced by Wilson’s arguments for entering the First World War on the side of Britain and France). Wilson’s suppression of all dissent was aided and abetted enthusiastically by the millions of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans who proved only too happy to intimidate their neighbours into “patriotic” silence. Wilson, an insouciant racist and segregationist, was also a ruthless foe of anti-war socialists and anarchists.

These frightening demonstrations of democracy’s awesome potential to tyrannise unloved minorities inspired progressive writers and journalists – most notably the redoubtable Walter Lippmann – to take careful thought about how the consent of the governed could be “manufactured” by those with less dangerous political instincts than the ordinary voter. Rather than follow the lead of the electorate, argued Lippmann, the Executive Branch of Government should be guided by public opinion – by which he meant by the publicly disseminated ideas of highly-educated and public-spirited intellectuals like himself. Unsurprisingly, Lippmann’s hero was Franklin Roosevelt: the aristocratic president whose “Brains Trust” and brilliant collection of young “New Dealers” encapsulated perfectly the managed democracy Lippmann never ceased promoting in his newspaper columns.

Roosevelt’s principled pragmatism notwithstanding, ordinary Americans – properly aroused – could still inflict a powerful amount of harm. Joe McCarthy’s “Red Scare” of the early 1950s used democratic majorities to suppress the democratic rights of the American Left. For the next 70 years, popular prejudices and political passions would prove remarkably resistant to elite instruction. The great American public were pretty damn sure that the opinions fed to them from on-high by the news media as their own – were somebody else’s.

Watching the idealistic journalists and presenters of CNN declaim in favour of peaceful protest and rail against President Trump’s atavistic instinct to terminate violent disorder with extreme prejudice, I was minded of the last moment in American history when the USA was convulsed from coast to coast by riots and protests. Journalists covering the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago had been outraged at the brutality meted out to anti-war demonstrators by Mayor Daley’s thuggish cops – and said so with considerable eloquence across the mainstream media. Their dismay is easily imagined when, over the course of the subsequent days and weeks, ordinary Americans in their tens-of-thousands denounced not only the demonstrators, but also the “liberal media”, and cheered on Mayor Daley and the City of Chicago Police Department.

The lesson was not lost on Richard Nixon. Four years later, in 1972, his appeal to “the great silent majority of Americans” would be rewarded with one of the most decisive presidential re-election victories in US history. Significantly, his extremely narrow 1968 win was made possible only by the fact that the all-conquering Democratic Party electoral coalition of 1964 had fallen apart. George Wallace, the fiery segregationist Governor of Alabama, was able to draw millions of southern voters away from the Democratic Party’s liberal contender, Hubert Humphrey. By 1972 the Republicans – Abraham Lincoln’s party – had transformed itself into the party of white supremacy, Christian fundamentalism and right-wing populism.

You gotta love the Americans marching for George Floyd and the fragile promises of the US Constitution. But, you also gotta keep your eye on the pale rider in the White House, and understand that behind him Hell follows.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 4 June 2020.

Poisonous Legacy: Why George Floyd Could Be Choked While The Whole World Watched.

"I can't breathe, Mama. I'm dying." - Last words of George Floyd.

LOOK HARD at this image. Think about what it depicts. Ask yourself how one human-being could behave so brutally when so many eye-witnesses – and very soon millions of people online around the world – were there to watch him do it. Then ask yourself why he didn’t care.

In this photograph, lifted from a video taken at the scene, the Minneapolis police officer whose knee is choking the life out of George Floyd, registers the presence of witnesses with a mixture of surprise and annoyance. The fact that he is looking directly into the lens of the cellphone recording his actions – strongly suggests that he is aware of what is happening.

Most people, caught in a similarly compromising position would respond by removing their knee from the suspect’s neck. The man was in handcuffs. He posed no threat to the officer or anybody else. The witnesses present could hear the man protesting that he couldn’t breathe. So, presumably, could the officer. So, why didn’t he remove his knee? Why didn’t he stop?

Part of the answer lies in the culture of American law enforcement. In all but the smallest communities, US police officers are encouraged to view their fellow citizens as the enemy. This is true even of white citizens, who will be shown scant respect unless the socio-political context of their encounter with law enforcement, and/or their possession of all the accessories of high social status, indicate a more deferential demeanour might be in order. In the absence of these warning markers, however, blank indifference to the rights and opinions of their fellow citizens is considered mandatory. Anything less would convey an impression of softness and weakness: displays of which could quickly lead to a potentially fatal loss of police authority.

With African-Americans, the need for maximum rigor on the part of law enforcement has always been a given. On the central question of equal treatment under the law, all of American history conspires against people of colour. Their role in the development of American capitalism – and of capitalism globally – may have been crucial. One cannot picture the cotton mills of Lancashire without also picturing the cotton fields of Mississippi! But, the great tragedy of African-American history is that it is equally difficult to explain the global dominance of American capitalism without acknowledging the racial segmentation of the American working-class. With racial prejudice forever forestalling working-class unity, anti-capitalism has never found any enduring purchase on the soil of the United States.

As long ago as the 1830s it was apparent to dispassionate observers of the American Republic that “free” white American males (the only people then vested with political power) were bound to the idea of the United States with chains every bit as strong as those which burdened its black slaves. The loyalty of the poorest white farmer and/or factory worker was in large measure guaranteed by his understanding that at least two categories of human-being would always occupy a more degraded position than himself in the socio-economic hierarchy: women and blacks.

Nowhere is this crucial political understanding more clearly spelled out than in the 1857 judgement of the Chief Justice of the United States, Roger Taney, who ruled against the legal attempt by the freed slave, Dred Scott, to secure equality of treatment under the Constitution of the United States.

According to Taney:

“The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all of the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen?”

The Chief Justice’s answer was an unequivocal “No”.

“We think... that [black people] are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time [of America's founding] considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.”

Taney’s (along with six more of the nine Supreme Court justices’) judgement stated more honestly than anything written before, or since, White America’s true feelings towards Black America:

“It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race, which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted.... They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order...; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”

It could hardly be stated more plainly: African-Americans have no rights which the white man is bound to respect. In very large measure the American Civil War was fought to nullify Chief Justice Taney’s (himself a slaveowner) crushing judgement. And though, by the victory of the Union armies, the slaves were freed, recognised as citizens of the United States, and guaranteed the equal protection of the laws, their victory was short-lived. Barely a decade after the war’s end, the relentless roll-back of African-American rights had begun. On the ground, where it counted, most white Americans found it more expedient to enshrine the prejudices of Roger Taney than to give heed to Abraham Lincoln’s “better angels”.

It required terror, of course, this denial of African-American rights: terror and the connivance of local law enforcement. Between them, the Ku Klux Klan, the local sheriff and the officials down at the county courthouse reduced those African-Americans still living within the borders of the defeated Confederacy to a new form of servitude. It would be another 100 years before the civil rights won in the Civil War were again afforded the meaningful protection of federal authority.

Perhaps predictably, the spectacle of African-Americans reaching out to reclaim their lost political, social and economic rights struck fear into white Americans. Across the whole of America this time, the prospect of giving up their privileged status – even if its surrender would greatly enhance the ability of all Americans to pursue happiness more successfully – was enough to drive working-class whites into the arms of, first, George Wallace, then Richard Nixon, and ultimately Ronald Reagan.

Is it drawing too long a bow to suggest that in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Struggle (1954-1980) the terroristic role formerly assigned to the Ku Klux Klan was assumed by local law enforcement? The Black Lives Matter movement would not say so. If he had not been silenced forever by a Minneapolis cop, it is likely that George Floyd would not say so. Not when practically every day in the United States police officers pay deadly tribute to Chief Justice Taney’s poisonous legacy.

Demonstrably, it is the opinion of American law enforcement that African-Americans are indeed members of an inferior order. So far inferior, that they have no rights which any white police officer is bound to respect; and that African-Americans might justly and lawfully be put to death – even when the whole world is watching.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 29 May 2020.

Something In America's Air.

False Flags: Violence in America is not something which comes from outside. Violence dwells at the heart of American society and culture: it is the constantly beating organ which pumps its deadly and destructive energy into America’s arms and legs; into its brain and hands; into its trigger-finger.

HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT the way a bowl of fruit goes bad? All those apples, pears, oranges and mandarins may have been picked together, transported together, displayed together and sold together; but they do not go bad together. There is always one that goes bad before the others. Looking at each item of fruit, as you fill the bowl, it is practically impossible to identify which one that might be. But, give it sufficient time, and the right conditions, and that piece of fruit will make itself known to you.

Stephen Paddock’s brothers certainly hadn’t picked their murderous sibling as a bad apple. They simply had no idea he was capable of unleashing horror from the thirty-second floor of Las Vegas’s Mandalay Hotel – or why? One of them told reporters that hearing of his brother’s deadly attack on concert-goers was like being struck by an asteroid.

And that’s the way the rest of America will attempt to make sense of this latest mass shooting. Paddock’s crime will be characterised as something entirely exogenous to the daily rhythms of American life: something which, like a wayward piece of space rock, arrives unheralded, and unstoppable, from somewhere beyond this world.

Except that violence in America is not something which comes from outside. Violence dwells at the heart of American society and culture: it is the constantly beating organ which pumps its deadly and destructive energy into America’s arms and legs; into its brain and hands; into its trigger-finger.

Violence has been fundamental to American history. Whether it be the genocide basic to colonial America’s birth; or the indentured servitude and slavery which underpinned its economic expansion; violence has always been absolutely central to the American project.

Perhaps the easiest way to drive this point home to New Zealanders is to ask them to think about Australia. Why did Great Britain send forth its convict ships to Tasmania and Botany Bay in the late 1780s? What could possibly have spurred the British to such a colossal investment of men and resources downunder?

In the most simple and brutal terms, Australia was Great Britain’s response to the loss of its American colonies. Until the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1776, Great Britain’s North American colonies fulfilled a role very similar to that which would, a decade or so later, be assigned to its Australian possessions: a vast wilderness into which His Majesty’s excess and most troublesome subjects – men and women – could be decanted. Throughout the eighteenth century, white indentured servants (persons legally bonded to their wealthy masters for a punitive period of time) vastly outnumbered African slaves.

Even after the American colonies won their independence, the stigma of indentured servitude and the rigid class hierarchy it did so much to engender and entrench, remained a constant of American social relations. The fledgling United States’ republican ideology may have attributed the individual’s position in American society to his or her own efforts, but the violence meted out by those ranked above, to those ranked below, was the glue which held American society together. Men were superior to women. Wealthy whites were superior to poor whites. Americans descended from the English and the Scots were superior to immigrants from Asia, Latin America, Ireland and Europe. All whites were superior to all blacks. The only good Indian was a dead one.

It was an economic and social hierarchy constructed out of, and maintained by, a brutal combination of legal, cultural and physical violence. That it drove American history forward cannot be doubted. Certainly, America’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, apprehended its moral legacy. Speculating in his Second Inaugural Address whether America would remain riven by the “scourge of war” until “all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword”.

Science tells us that what rots the fruit in the bowl is the effect of microscopic organisms that float in the air all around us. All it takes is a particularly forceful bruise, or tiny cut, to begin the process. The spores of violence, likewise, float in the cultural air Americans breathe. Inevitably, her most damaged citizens; the United States’ rotten fruit, will make themselves known.

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 October 2017.

Interview With A President

"That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

 

MIDNIGHT IN WASHINGTON. A chill autumn wind, laced with rain, sweeps across the reflecting pool at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. The water is agitated: the reflection of the Washington Monument’s towering obelisk fluid and fragmentary. The National Mall has wrapped the darkness of this bleak November night tightly around itself like a comforter.

 

Two figures – a young man and a young woman – emerge from the shadows and begin to climb the steps leading up to the temple of the Republic’s tutelary deity. As they mount the memorial’s broad staircase the great seated statue of Abraham Lincoln is gradually revealed behind its screen the towering Doric columns.

 

The figure is artfully lit. The Colorado marble blazes like white fire, transforming the giant sculpture’s gaunt countenance into a chiselled battlefield of darkness and light. The rail-splitter-turned-president’s gnarled hands grasp the arms of his mighty seat as if straining to pull the lanky body to its feet. As if, above the wailing of the wind, it hears again the distant rumble of enemy guns, the staccato drumbeat of civil strife.

 

The young couple stare up at the silent statuary. Hugging each other for warmth. Silent in the presence of the author of the Gettysburg Address, the Great Emancipator, the Union’s martyred saviour. Together, they recite the words incised into the rear wall of the temple:

 

IN THIS TEMPLE
AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE
FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION
THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
IS ENSHRINED FOREVER

 

“I wonder what he would say, if he was here”, whispers the young woman. “I wonder how he’d react to President Trump.”

 

A brittle sound, like uncrumpling cellophane, sends the couple reeling back in fright. Impossibly, the massive, frock-coated figure has become mobile. It bends forward, head lowered, eyes alive, a faint smile playing about its lips.

 

“Well, Miss, I reckon I’d ask him what in the name of the Good Lord he believes himself to be doing to my Republican Party.”

 

“What would you say to the people who voted for him?” The young man struggled to maintain eye contact with the giant stone president.

 

“I would tell them that those who attempt to deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”

 

“And those of us who voted against him, Mr President, what should we do.”

 

The giant leaned back in his chair and stroked his marble chin.

 

“I seem to recall saying once that you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. If I were in your shoes, Miss, I reckon I’d allow Friend Trump a few more yards of rope.”

 

“But the man’s such a fool and his followers are so loathsome!” The young woman objected.

 

“Maybe so, Miss, maybe so. But they are also you’re fellow Americans. If they are disposed, as you say, to follow a fool, then it is surely pertinent to ask what made them so ill-disposed to follow those who delight in calling themselves wise? And if they are loathsome, who made them so?”

 

“Those are fair questions, Mr President, but we are fearful of what this man may do to the United States, to its people, it’s institutions.”

 

The great face settled into something like its usual contours. The eyes once again hooded, the mouth grimly set.

 

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it. Or, at least, that, in my grimmer moments, was what I used to say. But through four long years of the most awful slaughter, I came to realise how ruinous the fall of a divided house can be. My belief, now, is that those who cry ‘Let justice be done, though the heavens fall!’, should be required to take up residence in the ruins. Democracy is a fragile thing, my young friends, do not be too quick to condemn its fruits. Those produced by just about every other form of human government are much, much, worse.”

 

“But is this truly democracy, Mr President?”

 

The great figure seemed to stiffen.

 

“You know I sat on a train once, pen in hand, mulling over how best to sum up what so many young men were dying to preserve. At the time I didn’t think that much of my conclusions, but it has pleased me to see how kindly the passing years have received the final words of my address.”

 

The wind outside the temple roared and bellowed. Autumn leaves whirled between the columns. The young couple shivered – even as the statue froze into its accustomed pose. A gravelly whisper, mingled with the wind, ran around the stone walls of the Lincoln Memorial. The young couple, recognising the long dead president’s words, added their own living voices to his fading peroration.

 

“That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

 

This short story was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Sunday, 13 November 2016.

A Lucky Escape?

Keeping Nope Alive: Tens-of-thousands of mostly young American protesters poured onto the streets of the major US cities in the hours following the shock election of Donald Trump as America's 45th President. It remains to be seen whether, in the days and weeks to come, middle-class Millennial hope is any match for white working-class resentment and rage.

 

ALL YEAR, NEW ZEALANDERS have quietly congratulated themselves on not being Americans. Like so many others around the world, we have looked on with mounting disbelief as the [Dis]united States of America plumbed new depths of malevolent ignorance. If it’s been said once, it’s been said 100 million times: “Thank God we’re not like that!”

 

But why aren’t we like the United States? What is it that we, as a people, did – or did not do – that has kept our political system from veering so suddenly, and dangerously, off course.

 

The most obvious and plausible answer is that we, along with many other Western nations, have maintained a reasonably comprehensive welfare state. More specifically, we have preserved a public health system.

 

It is easy to overlook the role a functioning public health service plays in preserving even a modest level of social equality. By far the most common reason for so many middle-aged Americans declaring bankruptcy is the crippling cost of medical treatment and pharmaceuticals. In just a few weeks, serious injury and/or chronic illness can swallow up every last cent of an ordinary family’s life savings. There are tens-of-thousands of American workers whose entire pay check gets spent on ruinously expensive medication.

 

It is one of the great ironies of the 2016 US presidential elections that Donald Trump’s supporters have been so vehement in their opposition to “Obamacare”. Granted, the Affordable Health Care Act has its flaws, but, surely, it is also a small step in the direction of universal, publicly-funded, health care?

 

“Hell, no!”, cry the Trumpites. “Obamacare is the thin edge of the wedge of socialism!” And you’d better believe that this verdict is delivered through bared teeth. As though, for people in their desperate economic circumstances, socialism is a bad thing.

 

We chuckle at the ideological incongruity of poor, white, working-class Americans voting for a man like Donald Trump. “Why can’t they see that they’re voting directly against their own interests?”, we ask. “How can they be so blind?”

 

For an explanation we must turn to American history, and the myths with which it disguises itself. The most enduring of these cultural illusions is that every American has a shot at success. That the path from shoeshine boy to billionaire is real. That it’s open to all. That it’s possible.

 

Persuading Americans that their much-vaunted equality of opportunity is a mirage is extremely difficult. But, convincing them that they are the prisoners of a class system every bit as pernicious as Britain’s is practically impossible.

 

But it’s true. As Nancy Isenberg demonstrates so conclusively in her recent book, White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America, the enterprises (and that word is used advisedly) which eventually grew into the United States were predicated on the most ruthless exploitation of indentured labourers and servants. Before America was a slave society, it was a society into which the English aristocracy and their entrepreneurial hangers-on decanted the poorest and most powerless of the English people.

 

That these readily disposable servants of the American ruling-class have, for more than 300 years, been regarded as more despicable than dangerous is largely attributable to two key factors. The first is the poor whites’ sullen awareness of their own worthlessness in the eyes of their social superiors. And the second is the consoling knowledge that below them on the American totem-pole there exists an even more wretched and put-upon social strata: Non-Whites.

 

This is the vicious political alchemy which has fuelled every outbreak of white racist populism from the Civil War to the rise of Donald Trump. A crude compound of resentment and rage, it may be directed, with equal success, upwards: against the One Percent and the disdainful middle classes (in whose eyes poor whites are indeed little more than “deplorable” human “trash”) and downwards: against the descendants of slaves, and that floodtide of immigrants whose descendants threaten to strip these “crackers” of what little White privilege remains to them.

 

And, before we congratulate ourselves too fulsomely on our lucky escape from America’s political and cultural degradation, we should, perhaps, recall our own national origins. New Zealand, too, grew out of British “enterprise”. We, too, deceive ourselves with the mythology of egalitarianism and classlessness.

 

There, but for the grace of God – and a still socialist public health system – go we.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 November 2016.

The 2012 US Presidential Election: One Nation Under God.

Instrument Of Redemption? Newt Gingrich's victory in South Carolina was constructed out of the still raw historical memories of the American Civil War and the uncompromising political evangelism which continues to divide the US population into saints and sinners.

ONE HUNDRED and seventy-eight years ago, in the little Massachusetts town of Charlestown, a mob of Protestant evangelicals attacked and burned to the ground a Roman Catholic convent and school. In spite of incontrovertible evidence of their guilt, twelve of the thirteen men charged with instigating and participating in the riot were acquitted. Recommendations that the state recompense the Archdiocese of Boston for its loss were repeatedly voted down in the Massachusetts legislature.

I re-tell this long-forgotten tale of religious bigotry and violence for two reasons. First, it is a useful corrective to the very common belief that this sort of behaviour is confined, historically, to the states of the American South – the so-called “Bible Belt”. Second, it reveals the crucial role evangelical Protestantism has played, and continues to play, in the history of the United States.

As the 1834 Convent Riot shows, the volatile mixture of politics and religion that so baffles foreign observers of the United States is nothing new; indeed, in the opinion of at least one American historian, David Goldfield, it has been one of its principal drivers. As he writes of the United States in the middle of the Nineteenth Century:

“[E]vangelical Christianity’s influence was everywhere in the political arena, in discussions about the West, about Roman Catholics, and especially about slavery. What was troubling about this religious immersion was the blindness of its self-righteousness, its certitude, and its lack of humility to understand that those who disagree are not mortal sinners and those who subscribe to your views are not saints.”

Goldfield’s observations resonate powerfully with the present condition of American political life. And if the most virulent expressions of religious intolerance have their present geographical location in the states of the old Confederacy, that is only because the creation of the Confederacy, and its ultimate defeat by Abraham Lincoln and the Union armies, was a product of the Northern evangelicals’ holy crusade against the “sin of slavery”.

One has only to read the words of Julia Ward Howe’s The Battle Hymn of the Republic to gain some understanding of the extraordinary moral fervour pervading the Union armies – especially following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:

As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on!

Religious fervour of this intensity inevitably incited an equal and opposite fervour among its intended victims. Messianic Methodists from the North were met by belligerent Baptists from the South, and their watchword was “redemption”. As Goldfield notes:

“Confederates talked of ‘redeeming’ their states from Union control during the Civil War. After the wall, the term usually implied a two-step process. Redemption would cleanse southern sins and therefore restore the Lord’s blessing on the South … it would also remove ‘the yoke of Yankee and negro rule’. Redemption, therefore, would secure for white southerners the victory denied to them in the Civil War.”

The clash of these historical convictions, in the shape of the civil rights movement, is still within the living memory of many New Zealanders. That struggle to make good Lincoln’s pledge was initiated and sustained within the context of Dr Martin Luther King’s evangelical Christian pacifism. It’s street-based expression stirred the conscience of the Yankee North, whose liberal protestant creed had been both tempered and extended through its association with progressive Judaism, the social gospel of Vatican II, and the secular humanism of “official” America’s science-based modernity.

It is by no means clear that the legislative victories of the civil rights movement betokened a genuine change of heart among Southern evangelicals. Certainly, the still-glowing embers of Southern Baptist redemptionism were stirred to life by the election of an African-American as President of the United States. Once again the racial, religious and cultural demarcations of American society are traced in lines of fire across the republic’s face.

Newt Gingrich’s victory in South Carolina (the first state to secede from the Union in 1861) offers proof of how brightly these fires can burn. His sudden surge in popularity in the run-up to last Sunday’s primary was almost entirely due to his thinly disguised attack on African-Americans. His depiction of Barack Obama as “the food-stamps President” harked back to the South’s rejection of “Yankee and negro rule”. He didn’t quite brandish the Confederate flag – but he came dangerously close.

It is a sobering experience to witness how readily the United States falls victim to its past. Sobering, yet strangely inspiring, that the political mandate of the Almighty continues to be so highly prized, and so bitterly contested.

For Americans, “one nation, under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all” will always be much more than a slogan.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 24 January 2012.

"This Mighty Scourge" - Reflections On The Tucson Shootings

As American As Apple Pie: Political violence is the inevitable consequence of so many Americans' refusal to accept the social and economic implications of political equality.

POLITICAL VIOLENCE is as American as apple pie. It has always been and remains the weapon of first resort in a nation dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal". By what other means could "the blessings of liberty", and the "general welfare" of the American people have been so consistently denied? Without political violence the United States, as we know it today, could not exist.

The tragedy in Tucson, Arizona, which left six people dead, and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords fighting for her life, is by no means extraordinary. Such attacks occur whenever Americans attempt to use the political rights guaranteed in their Constitution to secure the economic and social rights so clearly implied by expressions like "a more perfect union" and "the general welfare". Concepts upon which the Founding Fathers preferred to remain uncharacteristically silent.

Silence was, of course, the price which the more radical American revolutionaries had to pay to secure any sort of union. Because the institution of slavery, which underpinned the new nation’s economy, cast a fatal veto over any further constitutional elaboration of the sentiments contained in the Declaration of Independence. It was this – the institutionalised violence of human trafficking and forced labour – that cursed the infant United States in its cradle.

The American Right cannot, however, acknowledge this fundamental historical truth without endorsing the liberal school of constitutional interpretation they have so vehemently sworn to oppose.

It’s why the Republican Party-dominated House of Representatives began its first sitting by reading the Constitution into the Congressional Record. Not the original Constitution, mind you, which states, in Article I Section 2:

"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States … according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons … three fifths of all other Persons."

Those "other persons" were, of course, the African slaves - reckoned by America’s founders to be only 60 percent human.

Such wilful historical blindness is necessary to avoid the one, great, inescapable conclusion of US history: that the American Republic was only preserved by subordinating the oppressive letter of the Constitution to its egalitarian and democratic spirit.

Abraham Lincoln understood this. It’s why he spoke, at Gettysburg, of America experiencing "a new birth of freedom". Had he lived, the world may have learned much earlier what government "of the people, by the people, for the people" actually looks like.

But the South didn’t want to know. Steeped in the violence of slavery and the perverted social relations it spawned, the defeated Confederacy struck back through the trigger-finger of John Wilkes Booth.

Though it had been defeated on the battlefield, it was the South’s twisted version of freedom that ultimately prevailed. The same witches brew which had poisoned the first 70 years of American history was, with only minimal changes, permitted to contaminate the rest. Overweening corporate and financial power may have supplanted the "sovereign" power of the states, but the iron injunction against federal (i.e. democratic) interference endured.

In today’s America, the historic promises of the Constitution remain as elusive as ever. The victory of Barack Obama, far from closing the book on the Civil War, merely reveals the extent to which the Union’s victory over the Confederacy has been compromised. Behind the hopeful painted scenery of 21st Century America’s political stage stride the same dark forces that stalked the corridors of the Ford Theatre that fateful night in April 1865.

Speaking to the American people on the evening of Gabrielle Giffords’ attempted assassination, President Obama stood at a podium placed squarely beneath a portrait of a brooding Abraham Lincoln. His appeal, like Lincoln’s was to America’s "better angels". But I wonder whether, in his heart, President Obama did not recall the grim prophecy of his predecessor’s second inaugural address:

"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether’."

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 January 2011.