Diatribes of Jay: MLK Day 2019

[For reasons why the partial government shutdowns helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here. For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here. For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here. For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here. For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here. For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here. For additional reasons, click here. For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here. For Democrats’ core values, click here. The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights? For how our two parties lost their souls, click here. For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here. For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here. For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here. For a list of links to recent posts in reverse chronological order, click here.]

It’s easy for Americans to despair today. We have a president who’s mean, nasty and stupid, with all the empathy of a pit bull. He works hard to inflame our tribal divisions, not only along racial, national and ethnic lines, but by ideology, too. We are approaching levels of hatred based on pure abstractions not seen since our Civil War or our ghastly national blunder in Vietnam.

Besides his huge tax giveaway to the rich, Trump’s greatest success has been dividing us. He’s been so successful that our two parties can’t even make a deal on immigration although the outlines of a good one have been self-evident for years. Protect the “Dreamers” and temporarily-protected refugees, in exchange for tighter border security and better vetting of legal immigrants, especially as to whether they take jobs away from citizens. Then regularize undocumented workers, temporarily, after deporting the criminals among them.

Instead, Trump offers only to kick the can down the road for three years, when the Dreamers and refugees will be three years older, three years more committed to living here, and three years more embedded in their communities. Isn’t presuming that we’ll then deport some or all of them a cruel charade for zealots on both sides of the debate?

But MLK was not a man to despair. Bullwhips couldn’t shake him. Nor could jail, water cannon, batons, or two progressive presidents who treated his cause (at first) like a minor nuisance that had to wait for more important matters. MLK maintained his optimism, his faith and his integrity against every setback, provocation and defeat. In his mind—and therefore in his cause—he was invincible.

Every American desperately needs his perseverance today. Why? Because what we are fighting is not just some random evil or a few sinners among us. We are fighting evils and injustices that have been part of us—part of our national character—since our very Foundation.

These evils may derive indirectly from slavery. But because they were not part of slavery per se, they survived the Civil War. They survived the liberation movements and civil rights laws of the 1960s. They are still with us today, right under our noses, part of the fabric of our government and our way of life.

What is our Electoral College? It’s an aberration, a perversion of democracy, a clear and patent subversion of majority rule. Not only did it just give the presidency to Donald Trump despite a 2.8 million vote deficit in national popular vote. It also let our Supreme Court install George W. Bush in the White House despite a 544,000 deficit in popular vote, and it gave the presidency to three other majority-vote losers in our history (John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, and Benjamin Harrison in 1888).

Why do we have an Electoral College? Because landed, slave-owning Southern gentry like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington could see around corners. They could see that, in time, the Northern industrial states would accumulate more people, more money and consequently more economic and practical power than their South. So they jiggered the Constitution to depart from majority rule. Their doing so has given the South more-than-proportional power for two centuries and counting.

The same thing is true of the Senate. Every state’s entitlement to two votes in the Senate is the only thing that our Constitution explicitly forbids changing by amendment. Article 5 states in part that “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” Could it be that the South’s desire to preserve its unique, agrarian, aristocratic and slave-holding economy might have had something to do with that unique prohibition?

Our Southern Founders could see around corners far enough to protect their slavery-based way of life for 74 years—from 1791, when our Constitution was ratified, to 1865, when the Civil War ended after emancipation of the slaves. But they were not nearly smart enough to see how the structure they created would hog-tie us as a nation in the twenty-first century. The result is Mitch McConnell.

Racism, too, is a product of slavery, not vice versa as many suppose. Slavemasters didn’t invent the notion of white supremacy to justify their predations in Africa. They didn’t need justification: it was all a matter of “might makes right,” and Europeans and Americans had better weapons.

The crunch time for justification came in Virginia, in the years leading up to the Civil War. There, many so-called “free blacks” had most or all the rights of free whites. Some had been freed by kind masters. Some had immigrated on their own as free people. Some had bought their freedom by their own skill and industry, working as laborers “on the side.” Although they mostly lived separately from whites, in their own communities, for all practical purposes the free blacks were as free as non-indentured whites.

Their communities could have become nuclei of a truly just, multi-racial society, far ahead of where we are today. But that was not to be.

In the run-up to the civil war, slave owners wanted to be able to identify their “property.” In cases of runaway slaves, it would not do to rely on complex trials of identity and legal rights. It would be much easier to rely simply on appearance—the visible evidence of having descended from black Africans.

So the South invented the “one-drop” rule: the notion that anyone with a drop of “black” blood is “black.” Just as today, Virginia was then in the vanguard of Southern progressivism, in part because it was where Jefferson had founded his great university. But other Southern states put pressure on Virginia, as did its own slaveholders from within.

So Virginia, too, knuckled under the “one-drop” rule and the use of racial appearance as an emblem of legal subjection. As the civil war approached, Virginia began to repeal its laws protecting its own free blacks, so that by 1861 it could secede from our nation, built on the Enlightenment, and become a member of the Confederacy in “good standing.”

So far from God, and so far from anything resembling modern genetic science! Racism began as a practical way of identifying and claiming runaway slaves, nothing more. It was a purely economic expedient that gave rise to white supremacy only later, when whites who exploited slaves and profited from the system of slavery sought to justify the morally and scientifically indefensible.

The rancid justification has long outlived the institutions and practices that it sought to justify. It has outlived slavery. It has outlived the epidemic of lynchings in the South, now catalogued in a new museum in Montgomery, Alabama. It has outlived Jim Crow. It has outlived the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and it has outlived the Supreme Court’s recent evisceration of the latter.

Our Chief Justice John Roberts may be a good man. At least I’ve twice expressed hope that he is (first in this post and then in this one, on his opinion upholding “Obamacare”). But in ruling that federal supervision of Southern voting practices is no longer necessary, he committed the grievous error of mistaking wish and aspiration for fact.

The vestiges of slavery are still with us. White supremacy still metastacizes like a cancer in the brains of so many Americans, at times including our president. We still have white officials who will play any cheap trick to deprive our African-Americans of the right to vote. One of them is now governor of Georgia. We still have our Electoral College and our malapportioned Senate, in which voters in Wyoming have 68 times the practical voting power of voters in California, and most Southern states follow suit.

In light of these realities, I propose a simple test for the ultimate disappearance of vestiges of slavery. When we abolish the Electoral College, and when every single state voluntarily relinquishes its two votes in the Senate, and that body becomes roughly apportioned on the basis of population, we will have seen the back of slavery’s legacy. We will then, over two millennia later, have emulated the basic principle of democracy first applied in ancient Athens: majority rule. We will also have emulated virtually every other modern, parliamentary democracy among developed nations.

Of course that will happen only when every American trusts every other enough to accept his or her vote as equal. It will happen only when we Americans abandon tribalism for good, or at least consider ourselves all members of one big, happy tribe.

We are, of course, far from that utopia today. And that is why we celebrate MLK’s birthday.

He was not just an extraordinary empathetic and understanding man. He was a consummately skilled leader and a brilliant, if unelected, politician. He was and is our foremost secular saint and martyr, far surpassing Nathan Hale.

But Dr. King would hardly want us to spend his birthday thinking about him. He would want us to spend it thinking how far we have come on our crucial national journey, in part under his leadership. Most of all, he would want us to spend it thinking how far we have to go, and how best to get there.

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Diatribes of Jay

21 January 2019

MLK Day 2019

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