Juneteenth and Reparations

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A day late. A few trillion dollars short. This essay mirrors our four-century-long refusal to face the consequences of our original sin and fix them.

Recognizing Juneteenth as a national holiday is similar. It’s right and maybe even necessary. But it’s an easy, feel-good measure that costs nothing and changes little. The long, dark shadow of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and discrimination is hardly a shade lighter.

Over nine years ago, I assessed the chances of something like Nazi Germany happening here. I wrote it was “probably no more than 20%.” But that was before the Demagogue rode his Devil’s Elevator down into Hell and took us with him.

The January 6 Insurrection, his hundred-some lackeys in Congress—not to mention some 75 million mean and deluded voters—now put the probability much higher, somewhere near 50%. We have never come so closing to losing our democracy and our freedom, and we could yet come closer. We could easily tip over the edge.

Think about that. A flip of the coin, and we could lose our freedom and our heritage, just like that.

All the hypocritical but beautiful words of Jefferson, Madison and our other Founders down the drain. All the striving for “a more perfect Union.” Just another routine tyrant, like Putin, Erdoğan or Xi, strutting his stuff, making his threats, batting good people about the heads and shoulders like an alpha ape on the savannah, or jailing and poisoning them as if they were Aleksei Navalny. It damn well could happen here.

But why? What’s the force that drove us so close to the edge? While recovering from surgery, I’m reading President Obama’s latest book, A Promised Land. Perhaps inadvertently, it gave me a clue.

Obama is not just a brilliant thinker, strategist and a quintessentially good man. He’s by far, overall, the best president I was ever able to vote for. (I was too young to vote for JFK, who saved the world, or for Ike, who built the Interstates and warned us of the military industrial complex but failed to stop Joe McCarthy.) Obama’s also a genius, literary as well as strategic. Who else could describe an elderly nun, who gave him a crucifix that he kept for a good-luck charm, having a face “lined like a peach pit”?

So how in God’s name did his successor end up being the Demagogue?

It’s not really “hate.” How many white voters actually hate, fear and despise Black people the way white supremacists do? If it were really 75 million, we’d be hearing the jackboots stomping down every street in America right now. People like me, even in our mid-seventies, would be refugees from a failed state. Hitler started out with a far smaller proportion than that, and (thank God) we’re not there yet.

It’s much more like national stupidity, compounded into custom and eventually policy. It’s a case of massive, consistent, self-compounding national neglect.

It’s as simple as otherwise brilliant people, including our Founders, thinking they could create and maintain a great nation—a democracy yet!—while systematically keeping whole classes of people down. The direct line of compounding stupidity leads from Jefferson’s and Madison’s lifelong maintenance of slaves, to Mitch McConnell’s and Rush Limbaugh’s attempts to distract the public’s attention from the Crash of 2008 by convincing voters that Barack Obama was and is not “one of us.” In fact, he was and is among the best of us. (Joe Biden, we can hope, may have an even more effective presidency. But if he does, it will be because of Obama’s strategic vision, including his making Biden his VP.)

We call ourselves a “democracy.” But what other “democracy” has a legislature anything like our Senate? There our ten least-populous states, with a total of 2.9% of our population, can outvote the most populous nine, with 51%. What other democracy has an Electoral College that has given us five popular minority presidents, two in this new twenty-first century alone? What other democracy has anything like our filibuster, which has become a routine minority veto in our already-rigged Senate? And what other democracy has a clause in its written constitution, decreeing for all time that, without every state’s consent, the rigging of our Senate will only get worse, without any limit, as a result of inevitable demographic change?

Every single one of these infelicities arose from a single source. Our slave-holding Founders wanted to preserve their lives of agrarian, aristocratic privilege as far ahead as the eye could see. They designed our entire governmental structure, including our bicameral legislature, for that purpose. While writing brilliant words of praise for democracy and against monarchy, they had created a system even more oppressive than the landed feudalism their forebears had left behind in Britain and in Europe. They were not mere hypocrites; they were geniuses of hypocrisy.

So how do we fix it? How do we correct their errors and restore and improve what de Tocqueville optimistically called “Democracy in America.” What can we do practically and now to cure the continuing and compounding consequences of our original sin?

We could have another constitutional convention. But what small state would willingly surrender its disproportionate share of power in the Senate and the Electoral College? We could, I suppose, have another civil war. But rolling the dice of bloodshed that way, again, could be catastrophic, especially in the nuclear age. We could have an organized economic boycott, in which the states with real economic power force the little tyrant-states to their knees. But that might just lead to civil war.

In my view, there are only two realistic and practical possibilities to cure our nation’s congenital structural defects. The first is a second secession, this time not by the slave states or their successors, but by the big, powerful states fed up with being ruled by selfish, imprudent, backward demagogues. Over eight years ago, I wrote an essay analyzing how the secession process might work out if the backward states seceded. Much the same analysis applies the other way around: both sides might well end up better off, more content, and more successful on their own terms.

But neither secession nor a group boycott is likely to happen. The simplest expedient offers the most direct path and the least unintended consequences. We can simply get out the vote.

The last presidential election was the most heavily attended in over a century. Yet at the end of the day, only two-thirds of eligible voters cast ballots. One out of three didn’t.

Nevertheless, we got the right result. The Demagogue went down to defeat. But think how much harder it might have been to foment the January 6 Insurrection and maintain the Big Lie of a stolen election if the other one-third had also voted.

The case is much clearer at the primary-election level. Our Congress must admit demented, perpetually angry bullies like Jim Jordan, and over-the-top nutcases like Marjorie Taylor Greene because, on average, only one-third of eligible voters cast ballots in primary elections. In gerrymandered safe districts, true believers, whipped up to a frenzy by the likes of Rush, Fox and Facebook, control who goes to Congress. But what happens if the other two-out-of-three eligible voters actually start to vote in primary elections?

That’s why I think Stacey Abrams fully deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for which she’s reportedly been nominated. I hope she gets it. Her “solution” may not be as quick and decisive as civil war or secession, but its process is far more peaceful, constructive, communitarian, and ultimately democratic. We can fix America by building communities of voters who reject the demagogues, their conspiracy theories and simplistic mantras and will work to rebuild our Founders’ nation upon less hypocritical and far more egalitarian lines.

But how to get out the vote? The reason for the dismal turnout, even in general presidential elections, is that a lot of us have given up hope. Abrams turned the tide in Georgia by extraordinary community organizing, but there aren’t enough with her talent and brilliance to go around.

So what do we do? The trick, I think, is to offer incentives to people who’ve been left behind and so have become cynical and apathetic. That’s why it’s so important for everyone—especially white pols—to start talking seriously about Reparations, as I did in this 2019 essay.

Reparations are right way to atone for, and the best way to fix, the continuing consequences of four centuries of racial oppression. They are the fastest way to raise those who have been unfairly laid low, and to give them a stake and an incentive to participate fully in political action, including voting.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a wild-eyed idealist. I understand that Reparations may never happen. Even if they do, they may turn out to be the same kind of tokenism as the too-small, one-size-fits-all reparations for the Japanese Internment. They may be as symbolic as making Juneteenth a national holiday in a nation still burdened by customs, traditions, segregated conditions, and even (still) some laws rigged against Black people.

But the point is not the intrinsically unknowable end game. The point is the effort. When serious white people start talking seriously about Reparations, they will raise hope. Hope motivates voting. If Obama’s presidency demonstrated anything conclusively, it’s the power of hope.

The more people vote, the better democracy we have, and the fewer nutcases, conspiracy artists and flim-flammers. Getting out the vote is not just the fix most likely to succeed. It’s also the cheapest, quickest and least disruptive. And talking seriously about Reparations—even if you think they’re quixotic—is a good way to raise hope and motivate voting.

Pols and their self-appointed political consultants spend far too much time worrying about how the demagogues and propagandists are going to motivate a few percentage points of undecided white people, for example, by claiming (ridiculously) that the street fires in Portland after George Floyd’s police murder are coming next to their small towns. They worry far too little about the one-in-three people who didn’t vote in even the recent make-or-break presidential election, or the two in three who don’t vote in most federal primaries.

This neglect may have experimental origins, once identified by Albert Einstein. Scientists, including political scientists, often drill where the drilling is easiest. And it’s not easy to “survey” and poll people who remain on the margins of society, especially if their self-marginalization is due to cynicism and apathy. But isn’t the potential reward worth the effort?

First trained as a physicist, I’ve always been a numbers guy. The proportion of our population that is Black is about one out of eight of us. The ancient Romans used “decimation”—the killing of one out of ten—to subdue whole tribes and foreign nations. If we elevate the big part of the eighth of us who’ve lost hope, what changes could we not make?

So let’s everyone— especially non-Black people—start talking seriously about Reparations. They are the fastest and most direct way to cure the continuing and continuously compounding consequences of our original sin. Then let’s see how many forgotten voters arise, breathe in hope, and take an interest. What the hell have we got to lose?

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